Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Brighter Prospects for SaaS?

Historically, the transmission belt for new applications and communications technology has been that university researchers would come up with something new, suppliers would sell those innovation into the enterprise market, and then at some point the tools move into the mid-market, then finally into the smaller business entities, finally winding up as consumer tools in the final stage.

These days, there are different avenues. In many cases, innovations come out of universities, then go straight to the consumer market and then fairly quickly into the small business market, with enterprises and mid-market customers becoming aware of the trends only as individual "lead users" start to make use of the tools in their work roles. 

Of late, in fact, it is hard to point to any significant innovations that went enterprise first, with the exception of mobile email, which was driven by enterprise users. Everything else pretty much developed first in a consumer context, including instant messaging, text messaging, any-to-any email, social networking, blogging and wikis. One might get an argument about wikis, but some of us would consider wikis to have been popularized in the consumer space. 

So it is with software as a service, which most observers will say has gotten most traction in the small business and consumer spaces, and only now is being considered in the enterprise and mid-market spaces.

One has to assume the opportunities for such changes are enhanced by the challenges businesses and organizations now face, as potential buyers now are facing new questions about how they ought to be doing things. 

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