A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting with one of our customers’ IT leadership team for an IT Service Management strategy planning session. The organizations primary business is producing hardware and software. Their secondary line of business is hosting and managing IT Service Management solutions.  As you would imagine, they are always looking at ways to improve the variety of services and the delivery and management of these applications and services.They are also an organization that consumes their own service offerings, so, their concerns encompass their external customers and their internal customers.

We started off with an overview of the solutions (and supporting technologies) being delivered today and concluded with a “where we want to be tomorrow” discussion.  I love these conversations. They really are a delicate balance between absolute empirical technical data points, positions of financial objectives, competitive market analysis, keen portfolio strategy definitions, and even some flights-of-fancy….

Having covered all of the fundamental information, we began to explore a longer-term vision extending beyond the immediate, “tomorrow”: Beyond the next release of products that they need to install and configure – Beyond the next “application” that they may want to bundle and resell – Beyond the next round of pricing updates.

So, at this point, I might suggest that I know what you’re thinking, “here comes the ten-point value-based list of goodies that a software vendor uses to boast about why their Software as a Service (SaaS) products are so important, and why I can never be successful if I don’t buy their products…”

Nope. Not this time. What I am going to offer is why SaaS is really important to this organization….I’m not even going to drop down to the product or discipline level discussion. With that said, here are the three basic objectives of the company, and how an ITSM SaaS model is going to deliver innovation for this line of business:

  1. Time to delivery: Whether you provide services to internal customers, to external customers, or to both, you have to be fast. Every IT consuming organization has options on where they are going to spend their budget. And those monies are going to be allocated to whichever service provider delivers the most flexible and dynamic delivery source available – while also being able to deliver those services as quickly and error-free as possible. In many instances, you will find a balance between internal and external supplied services, creating a multi-source service topology. And the main reason behind this is being able to provide the most current – and relevant – business services faster than the competition. To sum it up: Time to Market!
  1. Service Portfolio: The world of technology (generally speaking) has witnessed exponential growth over the past thirty years. The most consistent hallmark supporting this growth has been focused on three factors: Physical (shrinking the actual foot-print of computing components), Navigable (ease-of use), and Value (how does this thing make my life / business better). SaaS serves the Value factor well by virtue of the competitive market in which the SaaS solution creators reside.  SaaS vendors are dedicated to delivering the most robust and comprehensive (yes, an overused and yet extremely appropriate term) set of capabilities to position themselves as competitively superior. So, why wouldn’t you, as a service provider, utilize the efforts of a third party organization to fuel your business? Rational: Increase the variety of services we can sell without investing in the development cycles.
  1. The Profit Margin: More for Less. “Gee, not too innovative”, you may be thinking. And this is true…to an extent. . The notion of being able to provide and financially support an entire line of business based on a third party application also is not new.  For many years now, our financial climate has forced every organization to think about how to invest the IT budget to better manage costs.  So, although the practice of financial responsibility and transparency may not be new, the increased variety of SaaS offerings – has become a main-stream alternative that delivers a higher level of financial cost management abilities. Also, what is new is the ability to absolutely – not notational – reduce the administrative, developmental, and managerial aspects related to a traditional hosted application service. Because we do not need to dedicate a vast army to “keep the system running”, we can shift these resources to creating new services and thus produce more revenue. Maybe resource realignment is not a new concept, either. But, the ability to do this without impacting the quality of services supported…well…that is just now becoming a reality for many organization. Yes, we can actually embark on a paradigm that delivers: More for Less.
Yes, SaaS solutions do have great impact on how we traditionally source and manage services.
Yes, SaaS solutions do enable organizations to expand and extend the services offered by our internal IT teams.
And Yes, SaaS solutions are great alternatives for how we manage our budgets and costs.
But even more so, if you need to think BEYOND tomorrow, you also need to think beyond the confines of your organization and leverage the resources available to you  – and your competitors – that position you to execute immediately with a wider array of services at the best cost possible.
By: Christopher Williams