SaaS makes its presence felt in new areas

Salesforce.com is synonymous with the rise of on-demand software but there is a long queue of other firms wanting to do for their own fields what Salesforce has done for customer relationship management and sales force automation.

A particular field of interest at the moment is in employee performance management, where firms’ human resources departments and invited others can view the results of benchmarking staff achievements against targets. This is widely seen as an obvious candidate for SaaS adoption and companies such as Employease and SuccessFactors are already building significant revenues.

Procurement, content management, search and security are also categories beginning to fill up with contenders. However, it is companies such as NetSuite and Workday that focus on suites of on-demand business applications that are understandably gaining most attention, alongside the frantic re-engineering efforts of the established giants swinging from on-premise to service-based models.

Other fields could be seen as retreads of existing models with occasional tweaks learned from the success of SaaS. Companies such as payroll giant ADP and recent Cisco conferencing acquisition WebEx, for example, ran strong businesses before repositioning themselves as on-demand companies. With software as a service so hot, their desire to stretch a point for marketing purposes is understandable.

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