Four and a half years ago, Endava took over the Digital Media arm of IMG. We looked at the service IMG were offering our customers at the time, and remarked that we were providing a Digital Media PaaS (Platform as a Service), or more specifically, SaaS (Software as a Service) way ahead of the rest of the market.
We were ahead of the curve and spent the next couple of years educating organisations and suppliers about PaaS, SaaS and cloud hosted Digital Media products. Various organisations joined our platform.
Some didn’t agree with this approach and continue to buy licences, servers and host internally, until usually something goes wrong or the key resource who holds everything together leaves the organisation.
There have been three key tipping points in the industry which has helped promote SaaS offerings over traditional licensing and hosting internally:
- Salesforce.com has become almost ubiquitous for CRM systems. In the commercial world, Salesforce.com has become a household name, and organisations accept that Salesforce.com is a cloud based platform. Salesforce.com holds sales leads and invoicing – really confidential stuff, which has made IT organisations accept that not all systems need to be inside the corporate firewall.
- Organisations are moving their email systems to cloud hosted servers such as Google Apps or Office 365, again relinquishing control of their data to a third-party.
- Adobe Marketing Cloud. Adobe bought Day Software in 2010 and have spent a huge amount of money marketing it, not only in the industry press but in the mainstream media too. Together with the power of the Adobe brand, a cloud based marketing solution became acceptable.
These tipping points sold the IT organisation and marketing organisations the benefits of SaaS.
My recent visit to New York confirmed that SaaS is now a standard requirement when companies asked us to confirm “And you’ll be hosting this, yes?” and “Do you have your own cloud hosting, or will you be using a public cloud?”
The concept of asking the client how they’ll host the solution themselves is as alien now, as asking about SaaS four years ago.