Flattered, but Frustrated

[mfrench123]

Today, I was fortunate to present and sit on a panel discussion at the St. Louis Gateway itSMF Local Interest Group chapter meeting. Like with most Local Interest Groups, the St. Louis chapter asked Service-now.com to deliver a vendor neutral presentation on the differences between software-as-a-service (SaaS) and the Application Service Provider (ASP) model.
After a quick break and positive feedback from the attendees about the presentation, a group of us were asked to sit on a panel to help initiate a discussion on the topic. Barry Brooks (Service-now.com Solution Consultant), Sara Goellner (Service-now.com customer Worldwide Technology), and a representative from Computer Associates (CA) joined me on the panel.

Sara kicked off the discussion and did a fantastic job providing her perspective about how SaaS has enabled WWT to be more effective and agile. She also described how WWT has been a SaaS adopter using Salesforce.com, a SaaS-based sales compensation engine, and Service-now.com (great job Sara!).

The mic was then passed to the CA representative, who was very polite and seemed to have a good grasp of ITSM and ITIL. It turns out that CA also has a 'SaaS' strategy in place using its data center to host Unicenter Service Desk and provide the application set over the 'wire'. After further investigation and asking a few key questions, the audience quickly discovered that CAs 'SaaS' strategy was really nothing more than offering the same old Unicenter Service Desk client/server software in an ASP model. Here are a couple questions the audience asked (mind you, I did not pose these questions):

1. How do customers make changes to the software?
(Most ASP offerings require the ASP to approve required changes as well as make the changes to the software. Service-now.com puts the power in the hands of the customer, allowing customers to change the look-and-feel and the way the application operates)

2. Does the software incrementally improve through automated releases? How often?
(ASPs most often offer the same client/server software that is installed in customer data centers. That means that the release cycle does not change — typically an 18-month roadmap. The difference is that the maintenance and upgrade process is passed from the customer to the ASP. Service-now.com delivers three automated releases per year that includes significant enhancements and new applications for no additional work or cost)

Call to action for our Community:
Obviously, the Service-now.com Community is fairly advanced in analyzing the difference between ASP and SaaS. If you were in the position of evaluating SaaS applications, which questions would you ask the 'SaaS' vendor to ensure they are truly delivering SaaS?

In closing:
This is certainly not the first time legacy vendors have shouted: "we have SaaS, too". While these marketing statements provide validation that Service-now.com is on to something special, it is also frustrating on multiple fronts. First, legacy vendors are achieving their objective of confusing IT buyers (although I am not sold on the fact that this is intentional. Perhaps they really don't know that SaaS applications were built from scratch using the Internet as the development and delivery platform). Second, this confusion may ultimately hinder their long-term ability to actually deliver SaaS-based applications. I am convinced they will quickly lose customer confidence by positioning ASP-based applications as SaaS. Third, this malpractice is not generally positive for the overall cloud computing and SaaS market place. My recommendation to legacy vendors is to spend the time and money to rebuild your applications using Internet standards, set customer expectations and don't oversell your offering. This will help you long-term as well as help continue to drive healthy, competitive-based innovation.

Matt

Personal thank you: to Sara Goellner for taking time out of her busy schedule to help educate her peers — great job Sara!