SaaS through the front door
Posted by Rhett Glauser on Mon, Jun 21, 2010 @ 02:40 PM
The topic of secret SaaS purchasing has been getting more attention recently with the release of new research by Ray Wang of the Altimeter Group. So I thought I would repost a post I orginally drafted in the Service-now.com Community back in March of 2009, with a couple of data points updated for relevancy:
The fallacy is dated now, but SaaS detractors used to hang their hats on the fact that big business and the IT organization would never accept SaaS. They did have a point in that most early adoption of SaaS in business began in the sales, finance or HR departments. The idea of a SaaS backdoor is based on the fact that many business units did not need to involve IT in the procurement and use of SaaS. They essentially only needed budget (or a credit card) and a business requirement.
We've always sold an enterprise SaaS ITSM app directly to enterprise IT and try to engage the CIO and CISO as early in the process as possible.
Liz Herbert of Forrester recently released a report titled, "TechRadar For Sourcing & Vendor Management
Professionals: Software-As-A-Service." Liz said that SaaS in IT management is becoming a hot area. Specifically, "Contrary to the belief that SaaS applications are only for business users, the success to date of this category shows that SaaS has the potential to transform the world of IT applications as well."
Funny thing is that there were only two vendors listed as SaaS providers in the IT management market, Service-now.com and HP. Don't get me started on HP SaaS.
With HP more accurately tagged as an ASP, I guess that puts Service-now.com in a pretty exclusive club of one. Honestly though there are some other legit SaaS IT management vendors out there serving the SMB. Also, it seems like Paglo [since acquired by Citrix] is doing some pretty cool IT management via SaaS that is getting some enterprise traction.
We've only been around for a few years but now ha
ve hundreds of enterprise customers who've typically replaced one of the big four's on-premise apps. We did it by having the audacity to sell SaaS through the front door to exactly the folks who were supposed to reject it.
I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that IT management via SaaS is, in fact, hot now. Stay tuned for other bold predictions such as, "I guarantee the Steelers will win the Super Bowl six times," and "It will often be warmer than 60 degrees and sunny in San Diego."