One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is how companies might approach adopting more SaaS (software as a service).  Specifically: what’s the motivating factor to make the jump from on-site hosted solutions all the way to SaaS delivery (skipping the Cloud Computing bump in-between), and which IT services in particular are easier than others to move to a SaaS model?

I’ve previously outlined the switch from IT capital expenditures to operational expenditures, and certainly that will be one area that a lot of CIOs and IT Directors will look at when considering their alternatives.  But that’s only the financial motivation, which doesn’t really address the real-world concerns that corporations as a whole will legitimately have about porting some services over from internally hosted services (which are, for better or worse, considered “secured”), to SaaS delivery.

So what services are easier SaaS targets, and why?  Here are a few of the common IT services that I hope to see provided through SaaS at more companies by the end of 2009:

Email: it’s ubiquitous, it goes out across the web unencrypted for the most part (although there are many ways to encrypt emails), and we always want it to be available everywhere.  Email’s close cousins are also good targets: calendaring, address books, and shared discussion folders would all be easy targets for SaaS vendors.  It would be great, for example, to see Microsoft host Exchange Server on-demand.  I’m sure lots of folks would like to have 7gb+ email inboxes that are automatically search indexed by a remote system for speedy searching.  And for IT, there would be numerous benefits, but perhaps the two most important: no longer having to manage the infrastructure necessary to support a globally accessible email server, and being able to readily keep track of the storage costs per each user and department.

Wikis: wikis have become more widely used as a collaboration tool for teams to work together on planning, documentation, and research in the last few years.  The best wikis are accessible anywhere, anytime to all team members at high speed.  All too often Wikis are hosted underneath someone’s desk in the office.  And when they are on a corporate infrastructure, they usually suffer from slower network links between offices.  Some wikis deal with more sensitive content that may provide pause for IT departments before jumping to a SaaS offering, but many are very simple alternatives to emailing documents around. And obviously, if email is already delivered as a service, there’s no reason Wikis shouldn’t be far behind.

Blogs: especially outward-facing company blogs, are easily delivered through SaaS.  There’s no reason they shouldn’t be delivered through SaaS: the whole point of the company blog is to share content, ideas and thoughts with your customers.  You want maximum accessibility and minimum delays for customers to be able to reach your blog. 

Support Sites: customer support sites, whether they be for software products or physical goods like shoes, bicycles, or hammers, are generally structured the same: self-service help, discussion forums, troubleshooting guides, product documentation, and technical assistance (although one would hope that a hammer is pretty self explanatory).  These sites also need to be available to a broad audience through a fast connection (as an aside: ideally customer support sites today should be looking at supporting OpenID or alternate forms of identification, with potentially hooks into social networks, to prevent people from having to create additional usernames and identities.).

General Purpose Web Hosting: company web hosting is another no-brainer when it comes to SaaS.  With perhaps only the exception of very large businesses that only sell goods online, most company websites can easily be hosted through a 3rd party company instead of on-site.

While writing this, I thought of one final point that’s worth mentioning: as data moves onto SaaS providers, indexing it through search engines to provide a single point of search entry for organizations will become much more challenging.  Perhaps a service in itself that will soon come about: enterprise search indexation (and content tagging) as a service.

Filed under: Enterprise Web, Knowledge Management, SaaS, Social Computing, Wikis