Enterprise SaaS Solutions: A different animal

By Arthur Lawida, Managing Partner
SaaS Accelerator

Enterprise SaaS Solutions are not the same as traditional SaaS applications. Initially, companies like salesforce.com delivered lightweight, single use applications in an on-demand model. These applications were barely customizable and extremely difficult to integrate with other enterprise level applications or within the enterprise information architecture.

SaaS applications have been moving upstream for the past couple of years into departmental and even enterprise wide solutions that are being customized to meet specific business requirements and fit within the enterprise architecture.

The traditional benefits of SaaS include:

1. Easier, faster and (hopefully) cheaper deployment.
   
2. More efficient and less costly management and operation.
   
3. Leveraging innovation investment across multiple enterprises.
   

The major downside is that since true SaaS Solutions exist in a multi-tenant (shared) environment, customizations are more difficult and the speed that those customizations can be delivered are often lengthened. Even if it is informal, negotiations must go on about every customization requested to see if it would be valuable to the other tenants and against all of the other customizations being delivered on the platform.

The tension between these competing desires (customization vs. SaaS benefits) is where every enterprise and SaaS vendor have their biggest deployment "discussions".

A specific methodology has to be employed that matches the enterprise requirements against the strengths and weaknesses of the SaaS application to find the optimal solution that leverages the benefits of the SaaS application and does not degrade the usefulness of the solution to the enterprise. After all, if the enterprise is talking to a SaaS vendor at all, they have probably already chosen it over a custom solution and know there will be tradeoffs. The key is getting the SaaS solution provide to understand the client's business and the client to understand the SaaS solution enough to reach the right compromises before deployment requirements are finalized.