Click here for interview on SAP Career on Demand with David Ludlow.

We are looking forward to watching how SAP on Career Demand develops and how competitors respond.

Forbes recently published a list of the world's 100 most innovative companies. The measure they use is the innovation premium markets pay for their shares (in a nutshell: the difference between what the company should be worth based on cash flow projection and what it actually is worth for the markets, who assume some innovation to happen to increase earnings above projection) - as good a measure as any, as long as you stick to listed companies.
With salesforce.com the mother of Enterprise Software as a Service does not only lead the table, but does so by beating the runner up amazon.com (another cloud company, engaged in IaaS rather than SaaS) by a good distance. Traditional ERP companies follow only on rank 63 with SAP, which is still beating Oracle (not surprisingly) and even Microsoft.
It will be interesting to see
(a) whether other original SaaS vendors will join the list. Workday will be an obvious candidate. They are not yet a listed company but with an IPO planned next year they should be expected to take a good position. On the other hand, established listed SaaS companies like Concur haven't made the list. Maybe their recent acquisition of Tripit will give them a boost...
(b) how well the markets' assessment turns out to be in a few years' time.

Whether Enterprise SaaS is going to rule the world any time soon, we at iProCon dare not to predict. However, we are sure it will have a significant part of the market and many organisation will benefit form Software as a Service in various processes. That's why we make it our mission to help clients
- to decide about when and where to use SaaS
- develop their bespoke architecture including on-premise and SaaS solutions
- manage implementation and the the considerable IT and business change coming with SaaS

When hearing "SaaS", most people think "higher standardisation", and "out of the box solution". Within the constraints of whatever configuration the SaaS solution allows, this is usually right. Multi tenancy usually enforces a common code base and doesn't allow custom development, while making upgrades faster and less painful, and quite often also making the configuration, as far as allowed, more straightforward than in traditional single tenancy ERP solutions.

However, the demarcation line between SaaS and "traditional" vendors is blurring. SAP, Oracle, and others are rushing onto the bandwagon to get their own SaaS solutions out, proving the success of the concept. However, looking closely at what's on offer in HR/HCM, using SAP as an example, you find that your first port of call is not the omnipresent vendor from Walldorf, Germany, but some of their more innovative (or just bolder) partners. SAP HCM SaaS comes packaged as "exalerate" (from Exaserv), "tHRive" (offered by ROC), "euHReka" (by NorthgateArinso),...

They all have in common that they use SAP HCM as a foundation but add their own elements, most notably web based and mobile user interfaces. It is difficult to see how purely SaaS the end product really is and many argue that the core product, as not designed to be SaaS, will never be a perfect SaaS solution. But that's not the question we want to ask here.
What we find interesting is: how will SAP HCM - and other solutions in a similar situation - develop as SaaS? Will it vanish as an anonymous engine hidden behind the brands and UIs of powerful partners, with marketing execs in Walldorf taking a leaf out of Intel's book and try to get at least a "SAP inside" sticker onto those products?

Will SAP prevail as the driver of the solution, but clients looking for SaaS need to choose between various slightly different packages adding nothing more, but confusion? Or will we get to a point, where each reseller adapts their user interface, pre-configuration, add-on developments, and service models to a certain segment of clients, e.g. an industry or company size? With this thought, there is actually a glimpse of hope that the current confusion will eventually lead to added value for clients, as they will find real industry solutions - not just modules covering a tiny part of the enterprise or half-heartedly pre-configured templates suffering from too small a customer base. Products with market shares as large as Oracle's or SAP's can definitely cope with some segmentation, particularly when the core product stays the same and industry based SaaS solutions are offered on top - in co-existance with the pure traditional model for those, who still prefer to be 100% in control and change their system wherever they want to.

Of course, there's always the option that SAP themselves will start late, but thoroughly, and overtake the partner solutions offering a better SaaS of their own and making the multitude of current variations obsolete. This has happened before with other add-ons and service models.

So, there are a few scenarios where SaaS based partner solutions could drive traditional ERP vendors to - what are you expecting?