{"id":10628,"date":"2011-08-03T14:26:00","date_gmt":"2011-08-03T19:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devweb.rjrinnovations.com\/a-saas-first-approach-to-application-portfolio-management-2\/"},"modified":"2016-10-13T10:21:22","modified_gmt":"2016-10-13T14:21:22","slug":"a-saas-first-approach-to-application-portfolio-management-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rjrinnovations.com\/fr\/a-saas-first-approach-to-application-portfolio-management-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A SaaS-First Approach to Application Portfolio Management"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong><\/strong><\/em>2010  was a watershed year in the evolution of the Softwareas a Service  (SaaS) industry. Worldwide sales of SaaS tools within the enterprise  application software market exceeded $9B.<sup>1<\/sup> The industry bellwether\u2014 Salesforce.com \u2014 continued to grow its revenue dramatically.<\/p>\n<div style=\"height: 8pt; min-height: 8pt; padding: 0px;\"><\/div>\n<p>A variety of IT research organizations predicted that by 2014 SaaS  products would account for more than 40 percent of all new software  sales. By any reasonable measure, SaaS is now considered to be an  acceptable and, in some cases, a desirable means of supporting a  company\u2019s business operations.<\/p>\n<h1><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\">SaaS Is Here to Stay<\/span><\/h1>\n<p>SaaS  tools were originally considered to be niche products,largely confined  to the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) segment of acompany\u2019s  application portfolio. SaaS products have matured considerably over the  past ten years and are now available to support back-office and  mid-office operationsas well. A variety of SaaS tools support human  resources functions, such as recruiting, contingent worker management,  performance management, succession planning, payroll and bonus  administration, and so on. SaaS products have also expanded into  procurement and financial management functions, supporting such  activities as pricing, quoting, order processing, tax and tariff  administration,and currency exchange operations. <\/p>\n<div style=\"height: 8pt; min-height: 8pt; padding: 0px;\"><\/div>\n<p>SaaS  capabilities have even crept into the IT function. Several companies,  including BMC Software, offer tools for servicedesk operations, project  portfolio management, vendor contract management,budgeting and  forecasting, and compliance administration that are specifically  designed for IT organizations.<\/p>\n<h1><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\">Why SaaS?<\/span><\/h1>\n<p>BMC\u2019s  IT organization has implemented at least one new SaaS application per  quarter since the first calendar quarter of 2009. We have realized  several benefits through large-scale adoption of SaaS tools. The hard  benefits associated with SaaS are well known to all IT professionals.  SaaS products are built, hosted, maintained, and operated by the SaaS  vendor. This approach can absolve IT of responsibilities for hardware  procurement and installation, availabilityand disaster recovery  management, and application maintenance and development.<\/p>\n<div style=\"height: 8pt; min-height: 8pt; padding: 0px;\"><\/div>\n<p><em><strong>This  transfer of responsibilities has enabled us to reduce the size of our  datacenter and achieve savings in hardware depreciation and maintenance,  cooling requirements,power consumption, and operator support. In  addition, we have been able to repurpose several members of our  applications teams into business systems analyst roles since their  former responsibilities for software coding and testing are now being  performed by the SaaS vendors.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<div style=\"height: 8pt; min-height: 8pt; padding: 0px;\"><\/div>\n<p>The  more significant benefits of SaaS adoption have been an accelerated  time-to-market of new IT capabilities and an improved return on our  softwarei nvestments. Through practice, we have developed the ability to  implement new SaaS applications in roughly three to four months. This  is in marked contrast to the time typically required to implement  licensed software applications. Like most IT shops, we would likely need  six to nine months to put a licensed software application into  production. This time would be needed to design anappropriate hardware  environment to host the application, procure and install then eeded  equipment, license the database software and additional utilities  required to support the application, customize the application to  support our users\u2019 requirements, and perform extensive testing in  collaboration with our users prior to the \u201cgo-live\u201d date.<\/p>\n<div style=\"height: 8pt; min-height: 8pt; padding: 0px;\"><\/div>\n<p>The  business sponsors of IT projects tend to have changing priorities and  short attention spans. One of the not-so-obvious benefits of SaaS  applications is that their original sponsors are much more likely to be  present to drive adoption and realize forecasted business benefits,  simply because SaaSimplementation timetables are so much shorter than  conventional application projects.<\/p>\n<div style=\"height: 8pt; min-height: 8pt; padding: 0px;\"><\/div>\n<p>The  second, less obvious benefit of SaaS products is the true return  achieved on a company\u2019s software investment. Simplistic financial  comparisons of SaaS subscription fees versus the costs of conventional  licensed software typically fail to capture all of the tradeoffs  involved. A simplistic analysis of the cost of a licensed application  will combine the costs of depreciation and maintenance of the software  and hardware that is initially procured. It will also include the  professional service fees of any external consultants required to  configure the application and the labor costs of the internal staff  required to maintain the software and operate the system. This total  cost of ownership will be compared to the subscription fees of  acompeting SaaS solution over a multiyear period, typically three  years.Whichever procurement approach results in the lower multi-year  cost would appear to be the preferred strategy (assuming that Capex and  Opex funds are equally available).<\/p>\n<div style=\"height: 8pt; min-height: 8pt; padding: 0px;\"><\/div>\n<p>What  this type of analysis fails to capture is the benefit being realized on  the maintenance fees for licensed software versus the subscriptionfees  for SaaS software. Many companies heavily customize licensed software  applications that have been implemented internally. In principle, they  are paying maintenance fees on the licensed software to preserve their  ability to leverage the functional enhancements in subsequent product  releases. In practice,however, they become mired in customizations that  make it difficult, if not impossible, to move to the latest version of  the licensed product. In contrast,enhancements in the functionality of  SaaS products are typically delivered in an incremental fashion over  much shorter intervals (four to six months).\u00a0 Incremental upgrades are  much more likely to be adopted immediately, producing a return on the  investment in SaaS subscription fees that is not typically realized on  the maintenance fees for licensed software.<\/p>\n<div style=\"height: 8pt; min-height: 8pt; padding: 0px;\"><\/div>\n<p>The  less obvious benefits of SaaS adoption significantly outweigh the hard  benefits described in this article. A SaaS-first application strategy  will enable any IT organization to reduce hardware and data center  expenses, as well as repurpose application developers into analyst roles  that produce more inherent business value.<\/p>\n<div style=\"height: 8pt; min-height: 8pt; padding: 0px;\"><\/div>\n<p>Far more significant is the ability to drive adoption of new IT  capabilities and ensure that the business benefits of a new application  are achieved. It is easier to drive adoption and achieve business  benefits if the original business sponsors of a new application are  available and enthusiastic at the time of \u201cgo live.\u201d This is much more  likely to be the case for the introduction of a new SaaS product.  Furthermore, SaaS subscription fees allow you to offer your users  functional enhancements on a much more frequent basis and avoid  maintenance fees for which you are receiving no immediate benefit. These  qualitative benefits are rarely captured in simplistic comparisons of  SaaS and licensed software costs.<\/p>\n<div style=\"height: 8pt; min-height: 8pt; padding: 0px;\"><\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';\"><a href=\"http:\/\/documents.bmc.com\/products\/documents\/01\/93\/210193\/210193.pdf\">Read the rest of this great article<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>By Mark Settle, Chief Information Officer, BMC Software<\/strong><\/em><span style=\"font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';\"> <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>2010 was a watershed year in the evolution of the Softwareas a Service (SaaS) industry. Worldwide sales of SaaS tools within the enterprise application software market exceeded $9B.1 The industry bellwether\u2014 Salesforce.com \u2014 continued to grow its revenue dramatically. A variety of IT research organizations predicted that by 2014 SaaS  [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[39],"class_list":["post-10628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-english-fr"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>A SaaS-First Approach to Application Portfolio Management - RJR Innovations<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rjrinnovations.com\/fr\/a-saas-first-approach-to-application-portfolio-management-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"fr_FR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A SaaS-First Approach to Application Portfolio Management - RJR Innovations\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"2010 was a watershed year in the evolution of the Softwareas a Service (SaaS) industry. 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