I was reading an article today that suggested that, while growth in the SaaS industry has been prolific in the past twelve months, the uptake of SaaS-based, ERP solutions has been slow by comparison. Concern over sacrificing the “crown jewels” or something to that effect.
Of course businesses are not identical in terms of their wants or needs and there is a wide range of alternative solutions to choose from. But wouldn’t most small to mid-sized companies be far better served by focusing on obtaining a broader set of enterprise capabilities, including E-commerce, CRM and ERP as part of a single integrated offering as opposed to spot applications that are singularly limited to each of these business functions?
Businesses are organized vertically by department and the heads of these departments quite naturally view systems, processes and opportunities for automation in terms of the improvement they stand to gain through this form of a direct improvement.
But customers don’t care about these direct improvements because for the most part they don’t see the benefit. They view business precision as having much more to do with an end-to-end capability to service their needs. Servicing the customer from that vantage point requires a tight integration amongst the core systems and processes.
Single purpose, one-off, spot applications, or whatever you call them, simply cannot deliver that form of tight integration without a considerable amount of development effort and cost, not to mention the ongoing maintenance.
It’s the sum of the parts, as opposed to the individual components, that will matter the most in the end. SaaS products featuring a complete set of integrated enterprise level capabilities will almost certainly begin to have a more profound impact on the small to mid-sized business in search of solutions in 2008 and beyond.
Dave Rice, TrueCloud CEO
http://www.truecloud.com.
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