I've always had a beef with pure-play software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors, the ones that have basically taken an existing on-premise function, such as CRM, and flipped it into an on-demand model. The problem with this model is that, once the novelty wears off, these SaaS offerings become more and more commodity-like, and their chief differentiation boils down to price.
This has made the early SaaS business a little boring for anyone looking to deploy something truly innovative at a functional level. SaaS 1.0 was about innovating at the purchasing, deployment, and maintenance level — as in monthly per user fees, no internal IT resources needed — but it had nothing to do with delivering new business services and functionality above and beyond what was already being done on-premise.
I'm happy to report that SaaS has started to get exciting again, thanks largely to innovations I call SaaS 2.0 The basic premise is this: By accumulating users, customers, business processes, and industry knowledge in a single place — the proverbial computing cloud — SaaS 2.0 providers can start to offer services and functionality that could never be delivered on-premise for love or money.
Many of these new opportunities appeal directly to manufacturers looking to improve product quality, on-time delivery, supplier management, and the like in the face of an increasingly interconnected, global manufacturing environment. Indeed, one of the things SaaS 2.0 is particularly good at is leveraging the growing need for connectivity across businesses by acting as a repository or clearinghouse for improving collaboration and, in the process, opening up new business opportunities.