SaaS For IT Management
This blog is all about using Software as a Service (SaaS) for IT Management.
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Collective Intelligence And SaaS- Learning From The Community While Keeping Your Data Anonymous
Posted on June 3rd, 2009 3 commentsI just read an excellent article on Cloud Ave entitled “The Cat is Out of the Bag (Again): The Hidden (?) Business Model in SaaS” which covers one of the truly unique (yet almost never talked about) benefits of SaaS: the ability to benchmark against aggregate community data.
While the article talks about community data in the context of companies that are going to sell anonymous aggregate community data, it does a good job at pointing out the benefits of benchmarking against live data:
Benchmarking has long been a lucrative business, practiced by research firms like Forrester, Hoovers, Dunn and Bradstreet, as well as specialized shops like the Hackett group - none of which were affordable to small businesses. More importantly, all previous benchmarking efforts were hampered by the quality of source data, which, with systems behind firewalls was at least questionable. Now that SaaS providers have access to the most authentic data ever, they can aggregate and process it, producing the most reliable industry metrics and benchmarking.
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Now clearly there’s a whole world of difference between selling aggregate customer data to advertisers, benchmarking, or sharing transactional data within your supply chain, but let’s now focus on what’s common in all these cases: new business models emerge, not simply representing additional revenue sources for the SaaS vendors, but also enabling them to deliver enhanced services to their customers, services that were simply not possible in the previous, behind-the-firewall fragmented data model.
Yes, this raises a number of serious questions: How far can SaaS vendors go? What are the security / confidentiality / privacy implications? Are they reselling data, or services based on data that the customer owns in the first place? If the customer owned the core data, who owns the aggregate? And just what is “aggregate enough” and “anonym enough”? The industry needs to address these issues as a first step towards a paradigm-shift: while current concerns about SaaS mostly focus on the security, privacy, and consequently isolation of business data, eventually a culture of controlled sharing for business benefits should develop.
Those couple of paragraphs make some great points about using community data for benchmarking purposes:
- Before now, small and mid-sized businesses simply couldn’t afford to pay for expensive research firms to give them “benchmarking”
- Even if they could, the quality of source data is questionable
- SaaS providers now have access to real, live data. The article uses the word “authentic” and I think that’s right on
The last paragraph brings up the point of data ownership and privacy/confidentiality, which is incredibly important. It calls into question notions of trust and security, both issues that absolutely have to be addressed by any SaaS vendor that features benchmarking based on live data. And when a SaaS company can ensure that the data displayed in benchmarking contains nothing that can identify any customer or company….well…..just imagine how awesome that will be.
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WILLARD September 5th, 2010 at 11:34