Technology review just published an article on Salesforce.com and their success as a provider of Internet-hosted applications.
They are a successful company, and are encouraging software developers to use their tools for their own hosted applications. Perhaps their tools will turn out to be the "Visual Studio" of the Internet.
We have a related course note on Hosted applications: software as a service.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Hosted applications: software as a service
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
While Salesforce is, deservedly, the poster child for SaaS, it's by no means the first company to offer hosted services. It's feature set, broad as it is, is vertical and tailored for companies with dedicated sales groups. By contrast, NetOffice (http://www.netoffice.com), which has been offering hosted services since 1997, bundles far more functionality that's useful to a broader swath of small businesses. While Salesforce goes deep into CRM and SFA, NetOffice combines unified messaging (toll free phone and fax, call screening and routing and forwarding, voicemail, outbound on-demand voice and fax messaging, and email) with groupware (calendar, task, contact, and file management, file storage and sharing, and CRM) and marketing automation tools to provide a more comprehensive set of essential business communications and information management services. And the cost is considerably lower, as well. So, while the high end pursues vertical solutions in payroll, HR, CRM, ERP, and the like, there are more than five million businesses in the U.S. with fewer than 20 employees (and 20 million with fewer than 200) for whom those vertical services offer very little benefit.
ReplyDelete