Even though I used to compete against Appririo I was always impressed with their team and their commitment to adopting cloud technologies. About a month ago (April 2010) they came out with their “$1M Cloudsourcing Guarantee.” Basically, the way the program works is that Appririo will craft a strategy for moving all of a given organization’s IT infrastructure to a cloud-based solution. If $1M in savings cannot be achieved over an on-premise solution Appririo will make up the difference in services. While I could blow holes in the fine print of the program on balance I think this is brilliant marketing and demonstrates Appririo’s belief in SaaS solutions.
What I really like is that Appririo has already outsourced all of their IT and is publicly talking about what they’ve done. I’ve long thought having all of your IT infrastructure in the cloud is the way to do it. They have organized their system three plus application suites – Google Apps for Business, Salesforce.com, Workday, and Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure.
Other than Workday I’ve used all of these solutions and in general I think these are all terrific solutions. Depending on the size the organization, maturity, and how much legacy business systems need to be carried forward will dictate which systems can / should be moved to the cloud. A clean-sheet start-up can make choices that just aren’t possible for a business that has an active book of business.
- Google Apps for Business: Good fit for just about any business no matter what size. I do not view GA as a replacement for desktop productivity software. We primarily use Google Talk (typically through Digsby) for IM, Gmail (typically through Outlook), Sites, and Spreadsheets. While the collaboration is nice in general the features in Google Docs are not good enough for pretty much anything other than use as a notepad replacement. Spreadsheets are terrific for basic spreadsheets to be shared with multiple users but the lack of PivotTables and relatively basic charting is a drawback for everyday use. We’ve found that the free version is more than adequate for our needs. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft’s forthcoming Office Web Apps displace Google for document collaboration.
- Salesforce.com: Properly implemented SFDC is in my mind a must have for any business. I don’t view it as just a CRM system (though it’s the best one out there). The challenge with SFDC is that it can be a fair amount of work to properly configure and to get the maximum value out of it you need the Enterprise version and some expertise configuring it. There is an entire industry dedicated to tailoring SFDC to your business’ needs. Broadly speaking its money well spent if you’ve got it. For the small business just starting out Professional Edition is a good starting point.
- Workday: As I’ve never used them I am not going to comment on that suite other than to state that we used Salesforce.com for HRM and Financials.
- On demand processing : I think these types of platforms: Azure (.Net), AppEngine (Python, Java), Heroku (Ruby), and eventually VMForce (Java) are excellent for point specific solutions. For example, these types of solutions are really a great-fit for hosting a single purpose iPhone application. AWS is unique in that it’s a suite of product offerings. EC2 is the closest Amazon analogy to these other system but unlike the others requires the purchasing organization to deploy an Operating System first. If you can convince yourself that the economics make sense, it’s a good fit for hosting a complex business application. Rackspace has a similar solution called the Rackspace Cloud.
In summary, there are a ton of very good SaaS solutions out there for just about every conceivable application. Some of the others ones that immediately come to mind include Zuora (Subscription Management and Billing), Cleverbridge (shopping cart), Quickarrow (Professional Services Automation), Taleo (recruiting), Eloqua, Vertical Response, and Marketo (Marketing Automation), and the list goes on.
