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Mar 2010
SaaS and the Cloud
Cloud applications started appearing in the past two years, and they are an attempt to broaden the remit of SaaS, going hand-in-hand with the opening up of vendors’ development platforms to their partners and customers. In the cloud application world, there’s also more highlighting of elastic infrastructure provided by the IaaS players like Amazon in terms of compute power and storage, which can scale up (and down) on an as-needed basis. What we have yet to see is a closer tying together of the SaaS and IaaS worlds so that the app players absorb the costs of extra compute and storage and don’t pass them on to users of their lower-end offerings. For now, cloud app players are mostly sticking with their tried-and-true per-user, per-month subscription fees, although for enterprises, some have begun offering enterprise-wide licenses covering everything that a large organization might onsume from them, including apps, add-on modules, their development platform and tools.
App vendors are looking to cloud computing as a neat way to pull together their SaaS apps with whatever they offer or plan to make available at the PaaS level. They’re betting that ‘SaaS plus PaaS’ becomes a recipe for increased stickiness for their CRM and ERP apps. As vendors expand the boundaries of their cloud apps, they also want to encourage users to live within their own particular cloud so that CRM or ERP apps become the central access point into all the software that users need to do their jobs. This has led to the addition of hooks into social networks, as well as other collaboration technologies, by some vendors.
This report examines the cloudy nature of current business apps, covering vendors in terms of what we judge to be their current cloud commitment – our ‘cloudy now,’ ‘cloudy wannabes’ and ‘cloudy later’ designations. It also provides analysis of M&A activity and offers market-sizing projections.
(ICE clients can download this report by logging in on the left-hand side under the client access box)
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