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2007 — Year of the SaaS EcoSystem
SAP has one. There’s Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. There’s WebEx Connect. And there’s Progress Software.
These companies are creating ecosystems of enterprise on-demand applications — and they are all about SaaS and SOA. While the approach taken by these vendors varies significantly in terms of how much control is applied by the infrastructure sponsor, they’re all targeting the creation of an environment where software partners can contribute specialized on-demand applications that are interoperable with applications developed and offered by other partners.
The SAP ecosytem, for example, is an expansion of the SAP NetWeaver platform, allowing partner solutions to run alongside SAP software. Salesforce is building out their ecosystem from the user base of their highly successful on-demand Salesforce Automation/CRM system. WebEx Connect is seeking to expand on the WebEx base of two million registered users and 25,000 customers — WebEx Connect is is based on infrastructure provided by Cordys, a startup company founded by Jan Baan. The approach taken by Progress is the least restrictive and has no requirements about where partner applications are hosted.
SOA/Web Services tout interoperability of services as a key feature, but this first generation of ecosystems is developing in much the way as the huge number of social networking sites have evolved, as sets of closed communities that are difficult to communicate between. Applications built for one ecosystem won’t work (or won’t easily work) with the applications developed for a different ecosystem. One advantage of a closed community is the ability to control quality, to test and certify interoperability, for example. But, in effect, lack of good interoperability still implies a lock-in to a particular platform. Long-term that will need to change.
SAP, Salesforce, WebEx and Progress are all are targeting 2007 as a year for expansion and there should be a lot of activity in this area. It will be interesting to see where these vendors go and what new ideas evolve from these emerging ecosystems.
