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Corporate SaaS considerations myriad, complex

Corporate SaaS considerations myriad, complex

Companies beginning to think beyond piecemeal SaaS rollouts.

Expanding SaaS

Those relationships can prove to be important as SaaS expands beyond its traditional roots in CRM and human resources applications. A recent Forrester Research study shows that applications such as collaboration, content management, market automation and order management are beginning to find interest among SaaS adopters.

In the Forrester survey, titled "Software-as-a-service adoption expands", IT executives are encouraged to create best practices guidelines that explore such things as backup and disaster-recovery policies, and adherence to corporate identity and access management policies.

The study also states that IT executives should develop standard contract language around performance, uptime and help desk support "so that SaaS buyers have a stronger sense of what to ask for when signing new agreements."

Breaking up

Another reason to develop corporate strategies is centered on the fact that SaaS is breaking networking down into increasingly smaller pieces.

"When SaaS vendors first started they needed the whole data center stack," says Rob DeSisto, an analyst with Gartner. "What we are seeing now is a breaking apart into specialized vendors. When you look at security or billing or integration services those are specialized needs that one vendor can't offer."

Those specializations are being fueled by the needs corporate users have to link internal systems to external services.

Start-up Symplified runs an identity federation service that lets companies keep their identity credentials on their own network but build a single sign-on (SSO) pipeline to all its online services.

"We provide the SSO and users don't have to do one off integrations," says Darren Platt, CTO of Symplified. Platt says the next pain point will be auditing, logging and compliance.

"Users have to relay on their service provider to tell them what users did and in some industries that is not good enough [for compliance]. People are just starting to realize that now," Platt says.

There are also security issues as companies start handing out passwords for each and every service.

"One of the benchmarks for security is how many separate passwords your employees have," says James Tu, former information security officer for commercial real estate firm CB Richard Ellis. "It's a nightmare to manage those passwords, it destroys security."

He says Symplified provides a nice SSO layer, and he says other services will have to come along to provide users with a single provisioning and account termination infrastructure.

"I think we need to see more infrastructure solutions that integrate SaaS and the stuff behind the firewall," says Tom Halter, director of IT for Whitney Automotive. Halter uses a Microsoft Exchange e-mail hosting service from Intermedia, which initially forced him to maintain two directories, one on each side of the firewall. Now, Intermedia provides a directory synchronization feature.

While Halter says his company has not come up with an enterprise services strategy; the surrounding issues have all been centralized within IT for evaluation and testing.

Another company servicing infrastructure needs is Hubspan, which does data integration.

"We eliminated the need to do [data] transformation and for our customers to buy integration software," says Nick Marchetti, head of commercial supply chain management for Visa's Commercial Solutions division.

The division set up an Accounts Payable Automation service 18 months ago using Hubspan as the provider to transform data from banks into a format Visa could process.

Now Visa can set up accounts and data mappings in two weeks instead of two months. In the next year, the system will be expanded into Europe and Asia.

"When looking at it from an infrastructure perspective, yes, you can leverage SaaS for infrastructure but you have to have that mindset from the beginning. You need architecture and vision for that from the start," Marchetti says.

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