Commentary on ServiceSphere post, "SaaS 3.0 and ITSM, Match Made in Heaven!!"

[rglauser]

Chris Dancy of ServiceSphere took some serious time to put together this comprehensive post SaaS 3.0 and ITSM, Match Made in Heaven!! A couple of the legit SaaS vendors (Service-now.com and Beetil) have taken time to add commentary, including a strong post from Service-now.com partner Michel at Aspediens.

It would be good to see the legacy vendors chime in but I'm not going to get my hopes up. My comment turned into another rambling diatribe so I thought I'd re-post it here as a blog entry:
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Man this was a comprehensive post! Nice job connecting the dots from some of the most of the popular commentary on SaaS for IT management during the last year or so. Not an easy undertaking.

I love the term you use, "ITIL clones." While we all agree that ITIL is a good thing, we'd also all agree that every IT organization is different and requires often significant amounts of app customization and configurability.

This issue of ITIL tool cloning is coming to a head with the new ITIL tool certification program coming out from the OGC. We'd say that SaaS significantly reduces the need for simple ITIL tool certification that fails to provide any additional value. More of my thoughts on the topic here.

My bucket list includes submitting edits to the wikipedia SaaS entry. This entry has way too many legacy cooks in the kitchen, specifically cooks from the ASP generation and cooks who want to marginalize the definition of SaaS to give their old technology a back door through which to sneak into the SaaS party.

Let's put it this way, you'll know modern SaaS when you see it. Take a look at Service-now.com or Beetil...then take a look at HP SaaS for Service Manager if they let you. There's a night and day difference in usability and benefit to the customer. On the Forrester scale, HP "SaaS" is an ASP at level one or two at the most. Not that there is anything wrong with that...it's just too bad they muddy the waters by claiming SaaS.

I guess you could call us hybrid SaaS, but we are really just modern SaaS with customer requirements as our top priority. Frankly, a year ago about 10% of our customer base chose to host Service-now.com on their own servers. Today that percentage is about 4%. We've seen a notable trend in SaaS comfort levels in one short year.

In regards to professional services, Service-now.com customers invest about 30 - 50% of their first year subscription license for implementation professional services. The typical Service-now.com deployment time is about 8 - 12 weeks. Of course, the customer instance is up and running in seconds but everybody knows that technology is just one part of an ITSM tool deployment that also involves people, process and culture. Modern SaaS eliminates the pain of ITSM app installation and maintenance while vastly improving app usability.

We feel our crowdsourced wiki page of Service-now.com integrations embodies the new model of SaaS integration based on Web services and SOA. More integrations are added to and available from this page as they are developed at no charge to our customers.

Some attribute the growth of SaaS in the SFA/CRM market to the under-the-table, credit card purchase. Obviously there are more reasons for the success of SaaS but we've found that there is no reason to fear selling SaaS directly to the IT organization. IT understands and desires the benefits of the SaaS model more than most business organizations.

As Michel mentions above, Fred Luddy and many Service-now.com employees have seen first hand how vendors fail IT. Fred has said that he built Service-now.com to atone for software sins of the past. I, with 260 customers backing me up, would say that we're doing a pretty good job at changing perceptions of enterprise IT software.

Rhett Glauser
Service-now.com