Why SAAS is the Future of Collaboration

From Wikipedia, “a Software as a Service (SAAS) model is a model of software delivery where the software company provides maintenance, daily technical operation, and support for the software provided to their client. SaaS is a model of software delivery rather than a market segment; software can be delivered using this method to any market segment including home consumers, small business, medium and large business“. In this essay, our guest contributor, Ming Yeow, will explain why this model is the future for collaboration.

Contributed by Ming Yeow

I will be reviewing the fundamental changes in collaboration between enterprises, and then discuss why software based on the SAAS model would be forming the backbone of these collaborative technologies in the years to come.

These main points will be covered:

1. Discuss what the next generation of collaborative technology needs to achieve
2. Look at the 3 major changes in recent years (RIN for short) that I believe will allow the SAAS to gain mass adoption in the area of collaboration.
   • Rapid achievement of business needs
   • Innovation and standards
   • Network effects and web ecosystems
3. Round off this talk with my vision of the future of collaboration

As businesses increasingly globalize their operations to realize greater cost savings and broader sales opportunities, how well they collaborate and share information with a wide variety of suppliers, partners and customers has become a key competitive advantage. Essentially, taking the right approach towards deploying collaboration technologies today is crucial for how capable they are of meeting the demands of the new business environment tomorrow.

To meet these needs, whoever is part of the collaboration cycle should become an integral part of the information infrastructure. More specifically, you should be looking at collaboration technologies to help you need these objectives:

• Collaborate seamlessly with the wide variety of suppliers and customers, with all of them having vastly different technical expertise and business processes
• Achieve a high and fast rate of user adoption
• Derive collective wisdom from the mountains of information
• Customize and scale-up to fit ever more complex business processes, and market expansion

The Software as a Service model is looking to become the future upon which future collaboration technologies are based on. Although SAAS applications are still a drop in the bucket compared to on-premise applications, CIOs have recently warmed up to the idea of a fully hosted application, thanks in no small part to Salesforce.com and their gregarious CEO, Marc Benioff. Thanks to him, we already know what the main business advantages of SAAS are – no massive upfront licensing costs, quick implementation and deployment, no IT maintenance costs etc. But while these current advantages are non-trivial, let us take a step forward and consider some exciting revelations and developments that is shedding light on the role the SAAS model will be playing.

I have summarized these key revelations and developments into 3 broader points (or RIN).

1) Rapid achievement of business objectives : May the Focus be on the User