Big software is a beautiful thing for SAP.  SAP knows this, it is what keeps their developers going and their customers upgrading.  Big software is well entrenched and SAP is counting on it being around for a long time.  In many big companies it's hard for executives to believe that they can improve their business by porting pieces of the company online, outside, to service companies.  A variety of concerns show up:  security of company data, scalability of the system, documentation to provide for SOX requirements, "what will Wall Street think" and so on. 

The real issues in my experience are simply connectivity, integration and usability - and these three can probably be netted down to how we get things done.

Take the simple example of lead generation.  The marketing team generates a bunch of leads for the sales team.  This is good so long as those leads land in the CRM system that the sales team uses.  Supply management will also be happy with many new leads - but please make sure they can see the leads coming in and they have advance notice of what they need to buy in order to satisfy customer demand.  Oh, and let's not forget about accounting.  A stack of new leads has just arrived, supply management needs to buy new inventory in order to satisfy customer demand and purchase orders need to be approved and sent to the suppliers.  The chain of issues rolls through the company like a set of dominoes.

As I see it, many individual functions are easy to port to a SaaS solution - at least in isolation.  It's easy to find an outside company or supplier to generate leads.  But the real problem lies in everything else that is effected by this simple act.  Big companies have large legacy processes and systems.  They have these because large companies chase the dream of knowing everything about every customer - all the time.  You know, the 360 degree view of your customer.  In reality, this only happens when everything is tied together - and yet, it's kind of tough to define everything, and even more challenging to tie everything together in a useful fashion.  And yet, that is the purpose of big software.

Breaking the cultural expectation of tying everything together, because we have to know everything, could be the unraveling of big software.  However, I don't believe the expectation of knowing everything is going away any time soon.  It seems to me if I can take a single function, like lead generation, and ensure that my big beautiful software stills receives the information that it wants (this happens through connectivity and integration) then I can improve usability and lead generation results.

Now, if I can just talk my boss into letting me take a piece of our company (how we get things done) - outside, to another party, just maybe I can prove that it works...

Hmmm... it's no wonder why SAP continues to think about big software... oh, and isn't this the same company that wants us to believe they are becomming a SaaS provider to small and mid-sized companies...?

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