Supplier Enablement

SaaS - Microsoft announcement

There is a flush of news about Software as a Service (SaaS) with Microsoft most recently announcing the availability of hosted CRM, click here for that story.

What characteristics does a hosted service need to have to be SaaS?

It is hosted. There is no specific hardware and software that need to be installed 'on premises'. The service is accessed from a PC with browser and connection to the Internet - that's all!

It is multi-tenanted. If it weren't then each customer would require their own system, that does not scale well and negatively impacts the economics of the service.

It has low start up costs. If you don't have to acquire hardware and software and you can use PCs that are already connected to the Internet then you can get going fast and at a low cost. This is particularly interesting to SMEs who do not have the capital budgets to invest in IT or the resources to build and support numerous applications 'on premises'.

While Microsoft will deliver CRM as SaaS during 2007, IMPAQ have a working SaaS built with Microsoft.NET and SQL Server 2005.

The IMPAQ Supplier Portal serves organisations of all sizes both in the public and private sector that need to exchange electronic business documents, such as Supplier Catalogs, Purchase Orders, Invoices and others.

The Supplier Portal makes collaboration easy between buyers and suppliers irrespective of whether they are high or low tech IT users as all they require is a PC connected to the Internet.

Like the idea? Click here for more information.

posted by FrankB @ Friday, July 14, 2006