The evolution of the application platform is an unprecedented opportunity for Indian entrepreneurs trying to launch their own software product. Kiran Datar MD, WebEx

The need to partner
The early success of SaaS companies has depended on their ability to provide more or less standardized offerings for managing employees, customers, suppliers, channels, production and inventory, etc. This approach, however, may also be its Achilles’ heel.

As a company grows and becomes more complicated, many of the till-now disparate activities, such as selling, may need to be integrated in real time with their other activities, such as manufacturing. In the traditional on-premise software model, the integration was achieved by patching the different pieces of software that were used to manage each of these activities. Sometimes, enterprises deployed company-wide software that had modules for each of these activities and the data was shared among all the divisions. So, for example, a sale at the retail outlet can automatically result in an order being placed with the suppliers, with hardly any human intervention.

The game changes, however, when one moves from software installed on-premise to services delivered through the Net. If, for example, a customer uses a sales management service from one vendor and an inventory management service from another SaaS vendor, there is a very high chance that the two cannot be made together to talk to each other easily. The problem is all the more acute as unlike on-premise software, individual SaaS vendors still provide just a part of the services that a medium-sized enterprise needs. The various offerings are not ‘integrated’ with each other.

This ‘integration challenge’ has two components—integration between two SaaS providers and integration between a software service and a software product, where the latter is installed on the computers of the customer. The second one has been easier to deal with, as the local or on-premise software is owned by the customer and can, therefore, be modified to facilitate data exchange with the Internet-based service. Indeed, most SaaS providers supply ready-made ‘bridges’ to most commonly found on-premise software, such as the ERP systems.

The bigger challenge and the one that is the scene of a lot of activity now is the integration between two SaaS providers.

“We are in talks with a company that provides an HR management service on Internet to integrate our offerings,” says TE Gautham, CEO of Appscale Technologies, which provides an Internet-based service for managing payrolls. “It would be easier for our clients if they did not have to feed details of number of leaves, incentives, etc. manually into our service. But we have realized that it will be a six man-month effort to tie up the two offerings at the back-end and offer a single integrated service to the customer. We may not do it unless we get a ready customer who will pay for the integration,” he adds.

An example of integration already in the bag is the case of WebEx and salesforce.com. With the click of a button, a company which has both a salesforce.com customer management account and a WebEx videoconferencing account can integrate the two services. “After a few clicks, you will see a WebEx videoconferencing button within your salesforce.com profile of your customer. Click on it and you can schedule a videoconferencing with the customer through our service,” says Kiran of WebEx.

Platforms offer new opportunities
The WebEx and salesforce.com example is an exception. Most SaaS services do not provide their users the option of integration with their other SaaS accounts. However, there is a third opportunity out there that arises from this challenge – that of extending a SaaS application. This is when the SaaS application becomes the application platform.

“Ultimately, this will be like the iPhone AppStore or Facebook applications for business,” says Kiran of WebEx, “All you have to do is write a good application, etc. And you have the whole world as your marketplace. The evolution of the application platform is an unprecedented opportunity for Indian entrepreneurs trying to launch their own software product.”

There are quite a few such platforms already, including salesforce.com’s force.com, launched a year ago and similar products by Google and Amazon.com. WebEx has also just launched an application development and delivery platform for third-party developers.

These companies provide a Web-based platform for developers to create and sell their applications that extend the base platform. In many cases, the platform providers also take care of the billing to the customer as well. In return, the ‘platforms’ charge a fixed fee for every user of an application, either from the developer or from the customer directly.

“There are already 68,000 developers who have registered with us on the platform. Nearly $ 425 million has been invested by VCs in company setups to create applications on our platform,” says Katz of salesforce.com.

Besides the obvious attraction of getting ‘hosting fees’ from the application developers or customers, the platform business also addresses the problem of integrating SaaS services. All the applications developed on a particular platform share a basic sub-structure, making it easy to integrate such services. “If you are a customer of salesforce.com’s customer management service and go to the application exchange, you will find 800 other services that are integrated in ours, including human resources management, enterprise resource management, manufacturing, etc. For example, Coda, the second biggest ERP vendor in Europe is on our platform,” adds Katz.

Besides opening up virtual marketplaces for small application developers, the platforms are also reducing the complexity of the application development. In an effort to keep the interoperability intact, the platforms do not provide the developer the freedom to go deep and change the underlying code. Instead, they provide ready-made tools, such as workflow diagrams, logic boxes, etc. with which developers have to construct their applications.

“However, the more you abstract the development interface, the higher the risk that the platform will restrict the power and flexibility of the applications developed on it. The challenge for us platform developers is to maintain this balance between ease of development and power,” Kantanu says.

“Ultimately, designing applications should be as simple as drag and drop,” he adds, “In our case, if you know how to edit HTML and JavaScript, you can construct an application for a school, for a hospital or a real-estate company. Once you do that, you can ‘sell’ the service to anyone and take a one-time fee from them for your marketing and coding efforts.”

Comments (6)

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need a projects
written by kumaryadav, January 24, 2010

This is kumar from bangalore iam running BPO the process is automobile form filling process, now we are looking for new projects, if any body can guide me in getting the project it would be of great help and we are ready any process , help me in this regards This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it 8147294756

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Customer Support Automation on SaaS
written by Shishir Jain, November 07, 2009

SaaS is revolutionizing how Software is used and delivered. The time to get started is reduced to hours. It has brought to the reach of a small enterprise the benefits, which were earlier restricted to large companies only.

We have large customers like Cisco Silver partners using it to manage complete customer support on SaaS, as well as small 10 people companies.

Take a look at http://www.netcellence.in/ for our product offerings.

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برامج
written by برامج, July 15, 2009

This can be useful if you need to empty a database in order to restore a backup made by mysqldump, but you couldn't use --add-drop-database because you don't have CREATE DATABASE privileges on the command line (e.g. you're on shared hosting). mysqldump adds DROP TABLE by default, but if tables may have been added or renamed since the time of your backup (e.g. by some sort of update process that you're trying to revert from), failing to drop those tables will likely cause serious headaches later on.

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COO
written by Akshay Shah, July 04, 2009

You can also look at www.iweb.co.in. It has all the SaaS ERP offerings.

Akshay.

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...
written by Business VOIP, January 19, 2009

a2z, like a few others in the business offers software on rent. So, instead of buying the products at one go, you pay a fixed ‘rent’ for using it. Besides, you don’t have to take the entire product on rent, only the parts you need. In Pathak’s case, for example, companies were offering to sell him an entire enterprise resource planning or ERP software whereas he just wanted something to keep track of the admissions process.-

I think this is a great concept, you are very smart business men.
How do I contact you for further information?

-JenCAN

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...
written by Business VOIP, January 19, 2009

"You said --->The early adopters of the technology so far have been the small businesses, typically those who have not already invested in buying software. And it’s very early days yet."

Do you see it growing to where larger companies would implement this?

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