Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

There was another slide in Software as a Service (SaaS) for Small to Medium sized Businesses ( PDF), one that warrants a separate posting:

The story here is about business webs, and how taking one SaaS service, such as Salesforce.com can lead to adoption of another, compatible, integrated service. Salesforce.com is leading the way in its Application Exchange, with most being natural extensions of Salesforce.com. Likewise, the recent Freshbooks.com integration with Basecamp directly makes both of their value propositions much higher.

However, some Salesforce.com integrations, like those in the Wealth Management category, are completely tangential. While such applications don’t add direct value to core Salesforce.com users they do add complementary functionality, expanding the very definition of the scope of the Salesforce.com mandate and why you’d want a relationship with them. (In time, Salesforce.com might consider a more application-neutral brandname).

Given that systems integration is difficult and expensive (and although XML / messaging layers like TIBCO and MQSeries made it easier), vendors doing the work for you make integration and business relationships much easier still.

As vendors integrate their services, the Value Chain diminishes, as does the notion of integration creating just a halo around the firm. More and more it becomes important to understand and appreciate the value of networks of firms, interlinked in an ever-morphing kaliedoscope of relationships.

And, to make sense of these relationships, you’ll need an appreciation of Value Networks.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Value Networks, Collaboration, Complexity, Knowledge Management, Organizational Transparency, EAI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.