Small and Medium Enterprises have traditionally been the adopters of the SaaS model, however the industry has seen a change in this trend with big player joining the bandwagon
Microsoft – A late entrant, can it take on the show like it did with the Internet Explorer..
It is targetting heavily on the SaaS market and it looks serious as is evident from the views expressed by its top brass. Steve Ballmer’s interview emphasises on Microsoft focus to bring in partners opportunities with its SaaS offerings
Symantec – Another big player taking up SaaS in its new release of the Norton 360 package. It is currently looking at focusing on consumer security domain before extending the security software-as-a-service model across the full enterprise portfolio
Oracle – realised the potential of SaaS early on, essentially due its CRM focus with Siebel it felt the heat with the success of Salesforce and decided to capitalize on the opportunity with the launch of Oracle On Demand 10
SAP – Again a late entrant into the field, launched its One Demand CRM service early this year, but it soon saw the future with SaaS and started expanding its SaaS offering, It made several public announcement within a quarter after it launched On Demand CRM improving the features and acquiring other players as means of expansion.
Business Object – announced earlier this year the On Demand Business Intelligence solution for the SMEs by offering Crystal Reports as a service.
However, there is one trend visible with these Big players entering the market, the real focus is on SMEs as the feeling is that the Adopters of the models would be SMEs. Although this might make sense for the big players, SaaS has potential for everyone, including Enterprises. There is a value offering for everyone in the SaaS business model.
More on this in the coming posts.
August 21, 2006 at 11:59 am
[...] In an earlier post I had mentioned how the Big wigs are encouraging the SaaS model and especially Microsoft which although is a late entrant, is catching up fast. [...]