STRATEGIES

June 28, 2007

Continued from Page 1

Governance and Security

As we move into larger enterprises, the need to track and log user activity and transaction flows becomes all the more important — especially for publicly traded companies that fall under Sarbanes Oxley rules. Virtually every transaction needs to be logged and/or have a sub-journal created so that after-the-fact analysis of user activity and reconciliations can be achieved.

Enterprise customers will put your system through a periodic security audit (by internal and external auditors), logging activity. This, along with security and user access paradigms, will take center stage. Password configurations, such as minimum password length allowed and required characters, password expirations and maximum login attempts, will also be considered.

Expect to be scanned. Before a new customer signs a contract or puts a single user on the system, most will run your platform and hosting facility through a series of security scans.

The logging sub-system can also be utilized for metering, which drives the billing engine. Logging feature usage is a great way to understand how the product is being used and can be very helpful to product management and product development.

Interface Facilities

Interfacing the SaaS application to on-premises back-office systems and other Web-based systems, as well as partner/supplier systems, is an important factor for large enterprises. Demonstrated ability to successfully build such interfaces using a variety of protocols, formats and methods can be a critical factor when large enterprises evaluate SaaS offerings.

Web Services alone are not enough. Although not as sexy, many firms will want to go with flat files or EDI formats over secure FTP instead of Web services.

As your customer base grows, so will the number of interfaces. Each has its own formats, schedules, etc. Having a self-documenting system is a must for managing this part of the platform effectively.

Internationalization

Multi-lingual, multi-currency as well as support for international dates, telephone and address formats is a must. Each major transactional document (Invoice, Purchase Order, etc.) needs to have home and transaction amount fields. Keep in mind that not all currencies round to two decimal places like US dollars.

Conclusion

We've seen that the SaaS single-instance/multi-tenant architecture can provide tremendous cost advantages. This is allowing SaaS companies to offer applications to the SMB sector previously only affordable by large enterprises.

However, cost savings alone is not a compelling enough offering to penetrate large organizations at a significant rate. SaaS has brought the SMB sector solutions that these businesses could not get before.

SaaS must do the same for large enterprises. They must bring new solutions and functionality that the enterprise sector has not been able to get.

The good news is that SaaS is more than capable of delivering with its high iteration rates and super fast innovation. However, complexity at the large, multi-national enterprise level is a greater order of magnitude, and without the right stuff in the platform, the iteration rates will slow and innovation will stymie.

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