Fight for the future
It’s no longer news that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a booming industry. We learned last year that 61% of North American companies with sales over $1 billion planned to adopt one or more SaaS applications this year. And Gartner projects that 25% of all new business software (CRM, ERP, SCM, etc.) will be delivered by means of SaaS by 2011.
What’s becoming news is what’s happening online. We’ve talked here before about the influence of Web 2.0 on CRM development. And the social networking achievements on the Web are compelling, especially as they suggest methods for delivering better customer service.
Datamonitor recently suggested in a report on the pharmaceutical industry that it should develop online communities as a tool for learning about its customers. Datamonitor predicts that in the future, the focus of CRM will move beyond managing customer relationships towards community-building and support.
More than a decade ago Sun Microsystems proclaimed that “the network is the operating system.†Software developers are of course attuned to the development path and behavior of operating systems, since this is where their users and their applications will work together. It should be no surprise that the Internet, as the largest network ever created, demonstrates almost daily new and original uses of applications. Here at Dovetail we take note of these innovations.
The forces at work on the evolution of software are fairly massive, in today’s connected global operating system. Microsoft may yield its original configuration to better online operators, with services reduced precisely to majority needs, or perhaps, to a degree, configurable on-demand. At the same time its original software may unlock so much new value that it occupies or dominates an entirely new market, especially as Microsoft becomes increasingly visible in the CRM field.
