By: Gaith

Finally Microsoft –MS- has entered the software as a service –SaaS- market, on last wednesday MS will debut its first hosted, on-demand software in its Dynamics line of financial, customer relationship, and supply management applications. The move could help the company stave off rivals offering software as a service.

SaaS is hosted web apps that are hosted at the service provider servers and that can be rented to companies in pay-per-user basses, clients do not need to install any software in their computers all they need is internet connection with a  web browser to use the SaaS application.

Dubbed Titan, the customer relationship management software will be available either as a service—hosted by Microsoft itself—or as a traditional application, where it should be hosted at the clients server not MS servers.

The move could help Microsoft compete against big SaaS rivals such as Salesforce.com, increasing Dynamics revenue as well as sales of other software lines such as Office. And that’s Microsoft’s plan.

 
Titan is just a start. However, it’s an important maneuver for Microsoft to provide a wider range of these types of services to compete against the likes of Salesforce.com.

 Salesforce and NetSuite need worry not only about Microsoft but also Oracle and SAP as they evolve their strategies.

 This move by MS can help it tap into mid-size and small business sector who can not afford to buy and implement a complete ERP solution from vendors such as Oracle, but with SaaS it can be affordable for them since they will pay on pay-per user bases, and that they do not need to buy the software and buy the needed server to host it locally. Another benefit for Saas that it can be accessed any where at nay time as long there is a browser and internet. Both Salesforce and Netsuite already target such sectors.

I had this idea back 1999 the project was code named Notopia, it was to offer a corporate portal with an e-business suite, targeting small business, but I could not find help from programmers to write the code nor get funding from venture capitalist –VCs- or angle investors, due to the collapse of the dot com industry in 2000.

 If I had managed to do make it real, I would have made millions by now lol. at that time I talked in 2000 with Larry Ellison CEO of Oracle, but he had his own plans with NetSuite.

 As always MS enters any market late, but it always manage to dominate, for example it entered the browser market late but its IE is number on now in the market the same with portals with its MSN. Which is ranked 3 in portal after google and yahoo. before that it entred the GUI OS late but managed to dominate the same with office suite.

 But this time it won’t be as easy to MS to dominate the SaaS market, a very popular rival Google introduced web office apps as SaaS this year, and I expect Google to merge or buy SAP to offer complete ERP and e-business suite to all size of business in the world.

Still, the Dynamics line of software overall accounts for just 2 percent of total revenue, according to Bear, Stearns & Co., which estimates that percentage will rise to 3.5 percent in 2007.

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