SaaSkatoon: All Things SaaS!

Power in the Cloud: Situational Application Resource Center

Our friends at SilverTree Systems have introduced the Situational Application Resource Center, a collection of information that is dedicated to furthering a very compelling cloud computing technology that is being defined as ‘Situational Applications.’

Situational applications are essentially rapidly developed applications that are designed to immediately address a business challenge – i.e. solving a business process inefficiency, extending the functionality of enterprise systems such as CRM or ERP without having to customize the core application, or addressing market and customer opportunities as quickly as possible.  Situational applications also represent an opportunity for ISV’s to develop and market “Long Tail” applications to niche / “micro-vertical” markets that have traditionally been underserved by the broader software industry due to high development costs and prohibitive barriers to entry.  Delivered Innovation partnered with Coghead in early 2008 to take a number of situational applications to market, including the Marketing Lucidity Lead Model and Marketing Budget Management; we are also in the process of delivering the Lead Model and Marketing Budget Management on the Force.com “Platform-as-a-Service” (PaaS) by Salesforce.com.  These are applications that provide highly specific functions for marketing budget and lead generation planning that would not have been viable just two years ago due to the high costs of developing such applications…costs that would have been passed through to our customers and in turn priced out the very customers we built these applications for.

Cloud computing platforms such as Coghead and Force.com have set in motion a “virtuous cycle” for SaaS applications and situational applications targeted to business users and companies that traditionally would not have been in the market for such applications because of the costs and technology requirements involved.  Because we don’t have to purchase servers, software, and network infrastructure upfront, we can focus our capital on building very specific and highly robust application functionality.  Because the data model, user interface, and business rules / application logic are all provided as standardized components by the PaaS provider, our development time is slashed by almost 75%, which contributes to our ability to rapidly deliver new value to our customers at a significantly reduced price point.  Because our price point is significantly lower than it would be in a traditional ISV model, we can create new markets for our SaaS applications.  When customers are introduced to the concepts of cloud computing, SaaS, and situational applications, they in turn find innovative new ways to apply the technologies to their businesses, creating value far beyond what we had originally envisioned.  And the customers that understand the game-changing implications of these new technologies want to build new situational applications to accelerate improvement and growth in other areas of their businesses.  All of a sudden, we’re looking at the potential of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) being fully realized, and companies are applying a building-block philosophy to technology and business processes.  It’s beautiful.

Please visit the Situational Application Resource Center today to contribute to the movement and find ways to deliver value to your customers and the community.