User Experience Will Determine Cloud App Winners in 2015
Going into 2015 the battle for control over the cloud is going to move from an emphasis on cost and control to the actual user experience being provided. To that end cloud service providers (CSPs) have been extending the reach of the cloud application environments to not only incorporate new functionality, but also tighter integration across a broad range of applications. Here’s how CSPs are doing it.
For example, Salesforce.com recently upgraded Desk.com, a customer service application delivered as a service, to provide tighter integration with third-party applications. By leveraging a common object model, RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs) and data virtualization across all those applications, Salesforce.com makes those applications appear to be more natural extensions to its core set of cloud applications. Salesforce.com has achieved a similar level of integration for its Salesforce Analytics Cloud, which now seamless rolls up data from not only its namesake customer relationship management (CRM) applications but also external sources of data from Dun & Bradstreet, Health Market Science and Thomson Reuters.
Similar efforts are also starting to emerge over at IBM. The IBM Verse cloud service is a set of tightly integrated cloud applications that users can seamless navigate. It won’t be long before IBM extends the reach of that platform to other applications. Likewise, SAP and Oracle (ORCL) are hard at work trying to unify the user experience across multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
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In each case, the primary issue is increasing the rate of adoption of cloud applications; the assumption being that once a customer starts to use one SaaS application getting them to sign up for another should be a whole lot simpler proposition. Today, however, the SaaS application experience most end users experience involves multiple user interfaces that provide little to no commonality. All too often “workflow” across those applications is nothing more sophisticated than cutting and pasting data between those applications.
Customers, meanwhile, are making it clear they value “agility.” Many IT folks interpret that to mean the ability to provision applications and services faster than can be done by the internal IT organization. But for the average business user “agility” is much more than that. More often than not the word “agility” from the perspective of the end user refers to how quickly a business process that spans multiple applications can accomplished. In that context, the internal IT department provides no agility because it takes months for that organization to integrate applications. Worse yet, that integration at best is often rudimentary.
Line of business (LOB) executives, as opposed to IT executives, are the ones who appreciate the impact that more sophisticated approaches to application integration can have on the business. In the coming year many of those LOB executives are going to insist on deploying a new generation of SaaS application platforms that inherently provide more business agility than can ever be achieved stitching together any combination of individual SaaS or on premise applications. Once that begins to happen, the way SaaS application vendors and their partners compete across the cloud will never be the same again.
