If you see SaaS without Services…They are not SaaS at All

There are too many SaaS players to list these days, in fact I would say that you can find any application on-demand, including human resource management, business risk management, logistics and supply management, and of course customer relationship management, so on, and so on… The number of startups I’m seeing in the SaaS space goes thousands these days, and it keeps growing.

However, what’s becoming annoying to those who are employing SaaS is that while the visual interfaces are always there, the ability to access both information and application behavior, as an API or service, is not there most of the time. Thus, if you’re leveraging a SaaS than you’ll need to pay a human to interface with that applications, and thus it’s almost imposable to effectively automate business processes that extend outside of your enterprise to your SaaS provider.

To my point, you’re not truly a SaaS player without exposing your core behavior and information as a set of services. Salesforce.com provides SForce for their services interface, NetSuite has a few up as well, but most of the other SaaS players either don’t have services exposed, or not enough to be useful. If that’s the case, they are not truly a SaaS player, just a Web-deployed application that people have to pay to use.

Therefore, when we consider SOA, we need to think in terms of incorporating all core systems into the architecture, and deal with them as services. This allows both the behavior and the information to abstract up into core business processes or composite applications that are easily changeable, as the business changes. Without those interfaces SaaS providers could actually add more complexity.

So, insist on using SaaS where service interfaces are part of the deal. Else, the money you’re saving in license costs will quickly come back in expense around enterprise architecture inefficiencies.