Software as a Service
<< best of both worlds; the ability to meet their operational needs, without affecting the financial constraints faced by many businesses today.”
Knowledge insight
What will likely be the upcoming developments to look out for in the world of B2B SaaS applications over the next 18 months to two years? Colin Bannister, VP technical sales for UKI at Computer Associates, reflects that the number of available SaaS solutions will continue to grow apace. With this in mind, he explains that Computer Associates is looking to build a knowledge system containing insight into what solutions are available in
the Cloud, what benefits they can offer and whether
they are a suitable option for a particular organisation. “As an example, a company may be running its email service in-house on Outlook, but obviously there is a potential solution out there called Google mail. So we will help companies to assess the cost of performance of their servers versus what, for example, Google mail can provide them with, as well as helping them to decide whether to go to the Cloud or stay in-house?,” explained Bannister. “We are looking at building what you could call Cloud insight. It will involve building a catalogue of trusted SaaS solutions currently available, with a view to helping users to make informed decisions about whether or not to move to a commodity-type service as opposed to doing it themselves – because there is a cost-performance risk element involved.”
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Special Report
Colin Bannister, VP technical sales for UKI at Computer Associates
always been there and have always worked particularly well. I think there is now an opportunity to re-examine that and come back to trading platforms. Our fingers were burned once, but we know what the mistakes were, and we do have to go back there one day because the advantages in terms of opening up markets to organisations will still be as compelling as they were in 1998/9.”
Hybrid on-demand, on-premise solutions
Van de Loo believes the trend is going to be for hybrid on-demand, on-premise solutions that will use the on-demand aspect for what he refers to as Cloud-native capabilities – basically things you couldn't have without the Internet or whatever network you are on. “It’s about collaboration with people outside your company and is something that we need that belongs on the Internet and involves some - thing you cannot do on your own network. And this can be linked to your on-premise systems. Your material requirements planning doesn't necessarily belong in the Cloud; there's nothing wrong with having it on premise. But you can tie-in collaboration with your suppliers together with your material requirements planning – so whenever you
In terms of quality of service, I think high availability is important; SaaS vendors need to know they can offer software to their customers wherever they are in the world.”
– Andrew Bond, Oracle.
Farr believes that the B2B world would like to re-examine the whole area of e-commerce. “We had a big crash in the year 2000. Lots of vendors providing e-commerce software on the web went fell by the wayside because there wasn’t enough value there. That was largely driven by a national model of licensing, which didn’t work and which customers weren’t willing to wear – paying a penny for every transaction. It was also about content. On the web you couldn’t buy all the stuff you wanted to buy, you couldn’t sell all the stuff you wanted to sell, and it was very difficult to catalogue anything. Interestingly, the cataloguing industry was the biggest B2B e-commerce industry by the time it all came crashing down. So we’re left with the storefront-type technology, which works pretty well; where we have a single seller and where we’re left with traditional B2B connections through EDI, which have
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MANUFACTURING
&LOGISTICS
IT May 2010
have exceptions in your ERP system your supplier can be informed about this on line and collaborate with you on how to solve this issue. So, we see more of these types of hybrid deployments where we extend existing and new on-premise applications by these Cloud-native capabilities sitting outside of the company. Here we see very big potential, and the opportunity to create new applications that use these Cloud-native elements as a core part of their functional scope and as a core part of how people interact with them.” Carmichael’s view is that the biggest development will be a demand for integrating SaaS technologies in the same way that there was demand for integrating the supply chains of organisations in recent years, and I know I probably keep coming back to it but that to me is the fundamental thing, helping that stuff to talk to each other. >>
www.logisticsit.com
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