{"id":3591,"date":"2016-06-29T09:25:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-29T09:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/thinking-outside-the-box-to-support-saas-applications\/"},"modified":"2016-06-29T09:25:00","modified_gmt":"2016-06-29T09:25:00","slug":"thinking-outside-the-box-to-support-saas-applications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/thinking-outside-the-box-to-support-saas-applications\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking Outside The Box To Support SaaS Applications"},"content":{"rendered":"
My husband and I have three children, including twins with autism. Over the past few years we have become accustomed to thinking outside of the box and trying different approaches as parents. We’ve learned the importance of good planning to meet a desired outcome (often the hard way!). We have also had to unlearn many parenting techniques employed with our eldest child to best support the twins. Service providers have undergone a similar transition, as they battle with how best to support the high growth area of SaaS services compared with the requirements of the on premise world of yesteryear.<\/p>\n
I’ve been an analyst for 20 years, a period dominated by legacy systems, on premise applications and a very strict view of the IT services Value Chain of Plan, Implement and Manage. Service providers and analysts alike list relevant services that should appear in each of these boxes to facilitate product development for service providers and market tracking for analysts. Since I started out as an analyst, I’ve tracked all sorts of services markets, from network professional services, to security services to application services. Jumping from topic to topic was never a major problem, as I applied the same basic principles of the IT service Value Chain to every area I covered. It was simply a case of coming up to speed on the new technology, understanding buyer needs, and identifying which service providers could throw a practice together to make money out of a growing hot trend. The Value Chain itself hardly altered. Sure, the specifics had to be tweaked but generally speaking service providers, analysts and buyers all knew exactly what you would get in each individual box:<\/p>\n
I still use an IT services Value Chain at HfS for the three main SaaS Blueprint reports I have authored: Workday, Salesforce and SuccessFactors services. It is useful because it outlines the main services that should be included in each IT service area. Here is our Workday Services Value Chain:<\/p>\n
Exhibit 1: Workday Services Value Chain<\/p>\n