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■COVER STORY
according to Colm Mulcahy, CEO of Saaspoint, a dedicated
SaaS consultancy. “Irish businesses are now beginning to
recognise that SaaS can offer the speed of delivery to take
advantage of those kinds of systems,” he says.
Turley agrees, saying the advantages of SaaS accrue to
enterprises of all sizes. “Benefits of the SaaS model include
faster time to deployment and less upfront consultancy
and implementation, which align very well with the SME
market as well as larger enterprises that want their peo-
ple to become expert on using the technology and focusing
>
on the business outcomes rather than managing the soft-
ware,” he points out. “The benefits of a more standard,
Paul Turley, HP
out-of-the-box offering need to be weighed up against the
loss of flexibility. For many organisations in Ireland, the
benefits from an upfront cost and deployment perspective
outweigh this loss of flexibility.”
The SaaS express
Mulcahy says the SaaS model’s initial success, in the form
of Salesforce.com’s CRM offering, compromised some of
the bells and whistles of on-premise applications in favour
of agility and speed of deployment. “When Salesforce.com
came to the market, it came with what it called functional
sufficiency – basically that you satisfy the functional
requirements to a 20pc level, where the usage requirement
is probably at 80pc – and it brought a product that was
Seamus Brennan, Cusp Point
probably lower in functionality than some of the competi-
tion, but covered 80pc of what needed to be done.”
Seamus Brennan, CEO of Cusp Point, a provider of doc-
ument management as a service, says SaaS has moved on
in terms of the features it can offer. It’s in the market to
compete with other providers and, as such, the applica-
tions it delivers must stand up to the merits of its rivals.
“You’d be very surprised at what aspects of the solution get
delivered in SaaS that are equal to or better than
on-premise offerings,” he says.
Good timing may also play a part in helping SaaS become
more deeply embedded this time around. Where the
Nineties saw significant focus on technology for its own
sake, the climate in the latter part of this decade has been
Tim Pullen, Saaspoint
about aligning IT far more closely with organisational
goals. “Flexibility of business is driving the change, not IT,”
says Tim Pullen, practice director with Saaspoint. “The
reality was that if an organisation of any size was looking
at a project of this nature, traditionally it was driven by
‘Benefits of the
the IT side. Now what’s happening is the business drivers
and the commercial side of the house are driving the need
SaaS model
for these things and they need it fast, and SaaS delivers
that.”
It could be argued that Salesforce.com has been so closely
include faster time
associated with driving the service-based model that in
many people’s eyes, SaaS equals CRM – another miscon-
to deployment and
ception, say those in the industry. “From 2002 to now, the
whole platform of Salesforce.com has become far more
less upfront
function-rich, with the capability to provide almost any-
thing outside of CRM in terms of an application,” Mulcahy
consultancy and
states. Google’s emergence as a serious software player is
almost entirely based on software hosted in the cloud
implementation
rather than on customer servers and PCs. Another marker
30 Knowledge Ireland September 2008
’
on the model’s journey to maturity is how the industry’s
biggest players have reacted. Microsoft, Oracle and SAP
among others have started to offer some of their products
as a hosted or on-premise option, giving customers the
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