Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is being touted as different things to different users by different vendors. The consensus, however, is that it could make life more exciting -- and profitable -- for businesses by allowing them to configure their own computer applications. They can do so only when they need to, with a little help from the CIO organization.
For the users, this might represent a reduction in upfront investments in computers and software -- money saved, which might then be employed more directly in the business. For the CIO, SaaS can take away the pressure of having to quickly deliver an application that the business users are hounding him to build yesterday -- the CIO can then ask his men to focus on building better rules for integrating IT with business and, down the line, on integrating the applications that come as a service with existing stand-alone applications.
The application service provider (ASP) offered to take away much of this pain with a different business model - the provider would host the software and companies could purchase the use of that software on a per-user and per-unit-of-time basis. ASP didn't succeed for the number of users and the cost of using it in that business model didn't work out. That was the failure of the dotcom era, says Dr. Sridhar Mitta, founder of e4e, which taps SaaS-ready software to sell business services to clients.
In a sense, SaaS is the promise of ASP realized. It takes the business model one step further by making the same software simultaneously usable by several users, each with their own customizations, and secure from the other - a concept called multi-tenancy.
At e4e, an interesting experiment is being tried out, which combines the power of SaaS with the power of offshoring.
Anand Talwai, president of e4e, says his company bundles the SaaS capability of sales force automation with the actual business service of doing what that sales force would do. "We have 500 small and medium mortgage brokers in the US as customers for whom e4e starts with generating leads and hands over at the point the loan can be closed. In e4e's case, of course, the money comes in the form of a fee that the brokers pay per-loan-closed. Today, we are doing about a 100 loans a week" says Talwai.
Each of these 500 brokers is a tenant of an underlying software that e4e runs in a multitenant environment. This also means each of them has their proprietary data residing with e4e. "It’s like Gmail," explains Mitta, "where your mail sits on Google’s servers, but you get access to it."
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