SaaS: What's Next?
There are many interesting discussions of SaaS these days, including this by John Loiacono of Sun - he focuses on a quick history of how we got here, and the business model core features. Not dissimilar from most educated posts on the topic.
What I don't see anyone discussing is "what we can project about the future of SaaS?" given a reasonable interpretation that this is a new wave of application architectures - and that no matter how different the value proposition, it will share characteristics with prior waves.
Prior waves of application architecture (mainframe, classic client/server) had the following progression:
1) Application phase: delivered new functionality that solved a compelling business need, priced in a way that business owners who felt the pain could afford this solution.
2) Integration phase: with applications solving problems everywhere, organizations focused on efficiency at the data and security layers across these applications (eliminate multiple entry and multiple logins).
3) Knowledge phase: as integration problems became hammered out, managers and users became aware of larger-scale flows in their use of the applications - prompting richer client technologies and smarter integration that focused on process, context, and agility.
Note that these phases aren't discrete, but overlap in waves. We're clearly in the early stages of the Application phase - there are hundreds of companies that are confirmed as true SaaS plays. Compare this with 10's of 1000's of client/server vendors and I think you'll agree that this we are still in the early days with SaaS.
So what's next in SaaS?
Salesforce is the iconic application company, and started trying to solve the integration problem/opportunity by declaring themselves a universal platform ("Multiforce"). We'll see what happens there but this is a hard game to play and the road to platform is littered with the dead.
We're already seeing companies like NewsGator and SmartCompany differentiating their offerings based on rich client integration (Outlook) and Grand Central saw the integration problem coming a few years ago (too early for the market). Who is going to really get into the SaaS integration business and solve data access and identity integration problem? Who is going build the platforms for better clients?
Because at the end of the day, we use browsers because we have to - not because we want to.
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