SaaS impact on the Enterprise

Marc Benioff was recently interviewed by Ben Woodhead from the Australian Newspaper on the Software as a Service charge at Salesforce.com. The full article is here. Benioff’s rant on the ‘us versus them’ analogy does raise interesting points for consideration. So why haven’t Oracle and SAP delivered SaaS versions of their flagship products?

SaaS presents an obvious environment for organizations to evaluate enterprise software, and try before they buy. It also goes along way at educating potential customers and enforcing the brand through the test drive experience. Yet the enterprise sales process is still about people dressed in suits getting on planes to spend 3 hours in a boardroom going through every function, in order to have 200 checkboxes in a matrix ticked off. This mentality is engrained within the investment justification process, and has not evolved in 20 years.

If the customer had the opportunity of spending 3 hours themselves evaluating the software, then they could perhaps readily identify how to solve their business pain before the vendor could propose how to. Customers know their own problems better than anyone outside the organization.

Vendors cry at the suggestion, and argue that the customer needs to be shown in order to prove the enterprise solution delivers. If the customer has to be shown, and can’t identify for themselves, then what hope is there for general rollout and user adoption? There is a strong argument here for how poorly designed a lot of enterprise software is, and how market leadership can be won on the premise of delivering well designed and intuitive software.

Benioff also challenges the fact that we have been using a spreadsheet, a word processor and a slide based presentation tool (PowerPoint) for nearly two decades, and that these tools themselves have not evolved at all. I couldn’t agree more. Will we still be constructing poorly articulated presentations dressed in sixteen point Times New Roman? In a future where web based and personalized rich media will become the standard for communication and collaboration?