SaaS: building a better platform for Enterprise 2.0

Just finished a great post on the Smoothspan blog regarding, Lack of Good Platforms is Stunting SaaS and Business Web 2.0. In it, they go over the overall advantages the consumer side has on the Web 2.0 front when compared to the business applications industry. They go on to say:

Because businesses require all sorts of things in their software that consumers don’t care about or think about. Security, configuration to fit business processes, and the desire to actually produce a measurable ROI and not just play around and have fun are all part of it. Robustness, scalability, and the desire to make sure that when you pay for a service you will actually receive that service are another.

Seems quite valid, and for those who are advocating for a Portal 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 strategy for their organization, these questions of ROI, scalability, security, all have to be answered before the powers that be can seriously accept a hit in the budget, but more importantly, change how people work together across the organization to maximize the results.

Which makes development efforts difficult, while consumer Web 2.0 applications can begin as one-size fits all, SaaS providers must provide a unique variation for their clients, even though in essence, it’s the same base application. This leads to Smoothspan next point:

This brings me to another advantage the consumer folks have that drives their costs way down: they have platforms. The LAMP stack is a platform for creating consumer web software. RSS is part of a platform. There are many others. Some carry across to the business world, but not too many. Not enough.

The lack of available platforms is radically slowing the availability of new SaaS and Business Web 2.0 offerings. Companies that want to play in these arenas have to raise a lot more capital and take a lot longer to build their first release than their consumer brethren.

It’s an interesting thought which naturally opens the door to think of and consider the potential for an Open Source solution; which is exactly what they consider in the rest of the article. All in all a good read, and I'm sure, many of these points I’m sure are on your minds as well as we come together for the PCC Conference.