I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with keychain logic's Ken Boasso (another East Bay local), which has gotten me thinking about some of the bigger-picture issues relating to SaaS.
I've chosen to do some thinking especially about what multi-tenancy architecture means for a SaaS business, beyond the selling points for customers and obvious first-order benefits for the firm itself (first-order benefits are well-documented; here's a brief summary from this blog).
One second-order benefit that is getting attention right now is the new-found ability of the service provider to aggregate and anonymize customer data (credit where credit is due - this is discussed here. Sometimes referred to as "A/A", the possibilities are of course enormous in terms of creating new forms of value, with resulting additional revenue models.
A couple of good sample ideas were presented here; namely:
* provide benchmarking metrics and data for market research and competitive analysis
* "interoperability" benefits
By that second one, I mean that companies will be able to take advantage of the ease of interconnecting with other software, particularly other multi-tenant software. For example, companies will be able to create improvements in supply chain visibility, move data back and forth between two different user accounts, sharing transactional data to speed up invoicing, etc.
So far, mostly I've just (hopefully) added some clarity to the discussion around these ideas.
I'll be thinking more about all of this in the coming days and weeks, and producing some more original thoughts at that point.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
SaaS is clearly the way to go for many types of apps. Google has learned from this too, as we can see in Google Calendar and other services. The tyranny of software giants and painful updates may be ending someday soon.
ReplyDelete