On Demand Blogging by Stephen Pech

The Software as a Service (SaaS) business strategy promises to take organisation infrastructure and processes to the next level of modularity, management and financial flexibility – but how well does it deliver on its promise today?  An enterprise that utilises only SaaS offerings for its IT&T systems is called an All SaaS Enterprise (ASE).  Can a company run purely on this model? 

At my company, NexGen, SaaS’s biggest Asia Pacific cheerleader, we have always endeavoured to ‘eat our own dog food’, and run an ASE. We succeed - almost.

As a start-up our requirements were clear.  We needed solutions that were quick to rollout, easily managed; offered flexible access, low upfront costs, and the ability to scale with our growth.  Software as a Service solutions offered each of these.  We deliberately went out to be as realistic as posible, building up our platform as if we were a normal non SaaS aligned start-up and based only on our internal requirements.  We did this to better understand the end customer and the industry.

The first step was finding suitable applications.  Part of our vision at NexGen is to evangelise Software as a Service in and for the Asia Pacific region so we are in a good position to know the offerings available but for someone outside of the industry it is still too much of an effort to find and test all the applications we required.  The SaaS community, including NexGen in the Asia Pacific region and the new channels that are emerging hope to improve this soon.  We utilised sources like Tanooma, SaaS Showplace, IBM’s SaaSpace and Neobinaries

We built our infrastructure carefully starting with the essentials, Office Productivity (MS Office), Networking (Linked In ), EmailSales Management (SalesForce), Document Management (Local storage), Telephony (desk Mobiles/Cells), Faxing (a fax machine), and basic website hosting (local web host).
Then in came the manual replacements - advanced Telephony (Alianza), advanced Banking (upgraded banking service), Fax Management (efax ); and more functionality advanced Document Management (Xythos On Demand), advanced web hosting, advanced Email and Calendaring (Hosted Exchange), Blog + Wiki (Hosted SharePoint) and Web Meetings (GoToMeeting ).
Finally we implemented Systems Management (TriActive ), Email Marketing (iContact), collaborative office productivity (Google Apps & Buzzword – see my article SaaS in the Office ), and mind mapping (bubbl.us).
Still to come are Business Intelligence (Enovation – see SaaS Business Intelligence), Billing (Aria ), advanced Business Networking (Xeequa ), and a Knowledge Base (Hosted SharePoint).  To give a simple user experience all applications are brought together in our Intranet (Hosted SharePoint). (local web host),

Is Internet access a problem? No, there is MORE access than the in-office alternative. I have access to our SaaS platform in our offices, as well as hotels, airports, and cafes, and I don’t require a VPN nor suffer from the slower access you normally experience with one.  It will get even easier with the rollout of services like WiMAX in Asia and the Pacific .

 What about support?  Believe it or not but we have LESS user incidents on our All SaaS platform than on an equivalent internal platform, due mainly to the focus on usable user interfaces and on applications doing one thing and doing it well.  Of the incidents we have had, most of the problems have been able to be solved very simply by either internal technical team members or even by the user themselves, mainly because of a high availability and relevance of self support options such as FAQ’s, training video’s, online manuals and built in hints and tips.  The main area of inconvenience has been in the few incidents that have required support by the vendor.  Though we have found SaaS support to be generally of a high standard, multiple vendors mean multiple support teams rather than one internal IT team, absence of advice in the context of our company, and a slower pace to action.   This suggests that there is space in the SaaS Ecosystem for outsourcers, MSP’s and aggregators to pull together multiple offerings and provide company contextual support and advice.

Is there a SaaS solution for everything?  We found suitable solutions for everything except Accounting and offline office productivity .  Being based in Singapore brings many advantages but it also brings specific accounting rules and a small market that has not yet been reached by a product focussed at small businesses – hopefully soon.
Also desktop based Office Productivity and email/calendaring are required when offline, however the offline web via Firefox 3, Adobe AIR, and Google gears will soon fill this gap (refer to my article “SaaS in the Office – Web based Office Productivity ”)

What is the overall experience? We have been running most of our All SaaS platform for the better part of a year and our experience has been almost unanimously good.  Of most importance to our business is that we have more functions available more often, and kept to a higher standard of availability than if we had in-sourced our infrastructure.  Our COO is effectively our entire IT department, but we still have hundreds of on-call systems experts to help us.  And most importantly of all, process implementation and change is more business driven, not technology driven.  See a full list of benefits in the accompanying All SaaS Enterprise (ASE) - the Applications and Analysis article.

 What would I do differently next time?  We are very happy with our infrastructure but if ‘next time’ the Web based Office Productivity area is solved, and there are Software as a Service Aggregators who can provide support in the context of our company, then we would take advantage of these.

See a full list of the SaaS offerings, benefits, hassles, worries see the accompanying All SaaS Enterprise (ASE) - the Applications and Analysis.

* I also post versions of relevant AsiaPacific articles from this this blog on the SaaS Asia Pacific Community site.