One of the barriers to enterprise adoption of SaaS and cloud services in general isn't security or unreliability; it's simply a cultural mismatch in the language that people use. This was brought into sharp relief in a presentation at Glue conference this afternoon by consultant and 'identity architect' Pam Dingle. She set out the difficulties she had encountered when following through a research exercise to find a set of SaaS applications to provide core enterprise services — email, HR, helpdesk, collaboration and several others.
The stumbling block was her requirement for the provider to offer a provisioning or authentication API so that she could automate provisioning of users and establish single sign-on for anyone in her theoretical enterprise needing to access the portfolio of cloud services she was assembling. Most providers don't offer such APIs, and those that do provide very little documentation on what capabilities they support. Discovery of what's available was a trying exercise. Relying on Google search and information provided on vendor websites to draw up a shortlist of providers, she found "I had incomplete results, I was frustrated and fatigued." Most enterprise buyers are likely to simply give up, she warned.
Only Salesforce.com and Google came up trumps, with good information and robust APIs, she said. But the industry is letting itself down, she added. Only this morning, seeing a new sponsor on the conference website that she hadn't noticed before, she clicked to its website and discovered it offered pretty much everything she had been looking for as an intermediary provider of provisioning and authentication. That company was Boomi (whose CTO I recently interviewed in a podcast). But she said it might reconsider its description of itself as a provider of infrastructure-as-a-service, noting that this was a term unfamiliar to many enterprise architects and certainly not the most likely search term they would use when looking for consoles to aggregate SaaS provisioning.
This is often very true as the perception of SaaS applications are not customizable. One of the ways we have done to counter this is the follow what Salesforce has done AppExchange. At NetDocuments we have created our own community with a marketplace to highlight and promote the many third party integrations, the use cases of our web services and how customers and partners can integrate, develop and extend a SaaS app as much as a legacy app.
The good news is that the proliferation of labels to describe this technology - SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, cloud computing, etc. - is proof of a vibrant emerging market.
The bad news is that it creates problems for marketers who need to work that much harder to explain to prospects precisely what it is that they offer.
Phil, tech marketers making their web site content "likely to be found" is a much broader issue than SaaS providers.
Meaning, it's a common problem, that's exasperated by this known fact. Instead of using keyword phases in content that describe what a cloud service actually does for the end-user, it's more likely that marketers use industry terms that are in vogue.
The situation is further compounded by a lack of understanding of terms that a typical customer would use to search for answers to "how-to" questions within the buying-cycle.
The result, SaaS providers use keyword combinations that attract their equally uninformed competitors to their web site -- not their target customers.
Now, I'm not suggesting this is profound insight, but I am highlighting how really easy it is to stand out from the crowd -- when you choose to think like a buyer, not a seller.
David Deans
Business Technology Roundtable