Recently I met entrepreneur and prolific blogger Bob Warfield whose recent SaaS, Mashups, and Web Software: The Rub is Customization hits upon several key issues in response to Dion Hinchcliff's The 10 top challenges facing enterprise mashups. First he confesses his discomfort with Mashups which was refreshing to read because I’ve been somewhat of a mashup skeptic for a while now:
"Mashups are a lot like scrapbooking. It’s way cool to build scrapbooks, and a lot of people love it. But the real deal is the photography. That’s creating content and not just framing it. Even Photoshop has a much more profound effect on photography than scrapbooking because it is tranformative. These things are missing from the mashup world so far."
In the enterprise context mashups are features not applications. They provide new and creative ways to do real-time integration often with innovative approaches to presenting results, but so far there is not much fundamentally new being created. In contrast, real enterprise applications solve specific business problems that are unique to each business, often require extensive customization to do so, and usually produce fundamentally new business data.
This is not to say that mashups will not find their place within the enterprise, I believe they will, but they look and feel more like features, rather than entire business applications unto themselves. I think we'll see more mashup capabilities finding their way into the self-service customization toolboxes of SaaS platforms as they continue to expose more power over application design and behavior to end-users. Mashup capabilities are particularly promising when woven into the fabric of platforms such as Force.com but standalone mashup platforms seem kind of oxymoronic and I think they’ll have a tough time finding a big audience. [Update: In short I think we will see uptake in enterprise mashups only when the tools begin to arrive in the enterprise via inclusion in broader SaaS platforms that are originally adopted for more critical business reasons, such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Taleo, etc].
In Dion's post he lists 10 reasons why he thinks innovation via mashups has not made much headway in the enterprise. Number one on his list is “No commonly accepted assembly model”, a topic deserving of a follow-on post by itself, but I think this situation combined with the relative scarcity of easy to use mashup tools baked into existing SaaS platforms is the answer. So what are business users doing then to solve their situational software needs? The same thing they've been doing for years:
"In previous posts I’ve discussed how spreadsheets are often the only end-user development tool available to the average person to meet this need today."
In my previous business we found that most companies, particularly SMBs, adopting our SaaS talent management solution had been using ad-hoc concoctions involving spreadsheets and email to manage their processes before we came along. The incumbent was often not another talent management software vendor, it was Excel and Outlook. It was business users who weren’t writing any code but they were in a sense creating their own applications using ubiquitous easy to use tools that have been with us all for years. And it's safe to assume that this is by no means limited to the talent management market, the same is true in the CRM market and just about any other business function that is not highly automatable.
This leads to the most significant issue in my opinion:
"SaaS and Web 2.0 software vendors that hope to satisfy business users and solve real business problems need to find a way to address the issue of self-service customization. They need to find ways of letting these users go beyond canned apps and mashups of data to create and transform."
Excel works for so many diverse business needs because it is extremely flexible and of course completely self-service. Take a look at successful SaaS platforms today and those that score the highest marks in both of these areas are leading the pack: Salesforce, NetSuite, Taleo, etc. These companies put tremendous effort into providing tools for business users to customize and configure their out of the box applications to adapt to business-specific needs. But this requires a real commitment and dedication to building the capabilities for extensive self-service customization as part of ongoing and long-term product strategy. A real desire to keep pushing the envelope on what users have control over in their SaaS environment at the metadata level without sacrificing multitenancy. [Update: Mashup capabilities are just one of many ways SaaS vendors can continue to push this envelope.]
[Update: So what kind of SaaS solution if any will it take to displace Excel as the situational software platform of choice for the average business user? I'm not sure there is a silver bullet here but I am pretty sure that extremely easy-to-use self-service customization tools will play a prominent role in whatever it is.] At Rollbase self-service customization is the crux of our product strategy and determines everything about how we build the platform and ultimately how we will approach the markets we will serve. In upcoming posts I will discuss more about our approaches to self-service customization and what this looks like within Rollbase.
