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October 24, 2006Software as a Service: You're Not in This Alone
As SaaS picks up steam, more resources are coming online to help with the transition to on-demand delivery.
Lots of businesses are starting to examine whether the emerging Software as a Service (SaaS) model will work for them. If you're one of them, consider this: It's working fine for a company that does twice eBay's volume of business.
Ariba Inc., based in Sunnyvale, Calif., claims the world's largest supplier network, handling about $93 billion worth of transactions annually. It has annual revenues in the $300 million range and about 1,600 employees. Thus, deciding to rework its flagship solutions for helping corporations manage their corporate spending, a category known as spend management, was not an easy or quick decision. But, once decided, there was no turning back, says Rick Collison, Ariba's director of spend management solutions.
Ariba implemented the first wave of its SaaS offerings in November 2005, and has been solution complete on SaaS for about nine months. As with most companies' transition to SaaS, it's been a bumpy road, but worth the wear and tear. "We're walking, not running," Collison asserts.
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Michelle, you may want to check the facts. All Ariba's transactions may not be through SaaS offering.
ebdex also offers a SaaS product (launched recently). More information can be found from http://www.ebdex.co.uk
Posted by: Manoj Ranaweera at October 27, 2006 03:58 PM | Permalink
Yes SaaS is picking up demand. Ariba's licensing revenues where down 27% while the subscription and maintenance revenues where up 29%. Even googles tiny weapons against Microst, Writely and Google spreadsheets are SaaS products. But it is still not clear how SaaS can be used where data is sensitive or heavy customisation of work is required. I think companies will prefer hosting the application in-house when it is business critical. Also some people sell simple managed hosting as SaaS which dilutes the value of SaaS.
People who have had good/bad experience with SaaS, please post your comments here and/or mail logistics.supplychain@gmail.com
Senthil Nathan
http://supplychain-logistics.com/
Posted by: Senthil Nathan at October 30, 2006 12:39 PM | Permalink
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