A new survey by research firm Gartner found that businesses were relatively lukewarm to software as a service, suggesting that, despite the hype, these applications need more work in order to gain full acceptance within the enterprise. Those who declined to use SAAS cited high costs, difficulty with integration and failure to meet technical requirements as primary reasons.A new survey by research firm Gartner shows that not everyone
in the enterprise is overwhelmed with love for software as a service, even as it becomes an increasingly
mainstream aspect of business life. According to the attendant survey, much of
the dissatisfaction stems from less-than-ideal interactions with SAAS.
The survey found that 58 percent of the 333 organizations in
the United States and the U.K. will maintain their current level of SAAS applications, while another 32 percent plan to
expand their offerings. However, 10 percent of respondents also indicated that
they planned to either discontinue (5 percent) or scale down (5 percent) their
levels of SAAS.
The organizations rated their overall satisfaction with SAAS
as 4.74 on a 7-point scale, with their judgments based on 16 metrics including
functionality for business users, service reliability, support compliance and
risk management. Organizations based in the United States rated their satisfaction as
slightly higher, at 4.94, than U.K. organizations, who rated SAAS at 4.34.
"Our research findings did not exactly provide a ringing
endorsement of SAAS; in fact I would go as far as to say that
satisfaction
levels among SAAS users are little more than
lukewarm," Ben Pring, research vice president at Gartner, said in a
statement. "Although macroeconomic factors would seem to favor SAAS
providers, almost two-thirds of respondents
said that they planned only to maintain their current levels of SAAS in
the next two years."
Those surveyed who declined to use SAAS cited the high cost of service, difficulty
with integration and failure of the solution to meet technical requirements as
their reasons. When pondering whether to deploy SAAS, respondents suggested that
meeting technical requirements, security and privacy, and ease of integration
and functionality were the top three factors they would need to
consider.
"Underwhelming customer satisfaction scores, hesitation over
the true cost of SAAS solutions and
concerns regarding how successfully SAAS
applications can be integrated with other applications all point to issues that
will need addressing and resolving," Twiggy Lo, an analyst at Gartner, said in a
statement.
At least a few software vendors for the enterprise feel that
a few more elements are needed before SAAS
can truly take hold within a business context.
"There are two overlapping issues at play: billing and
provisioning," Soeren von Varchmin, vice president of SAAS and Service Providers International for
Parallels, a virtualization and automation software designer, said in a
statement to eWEEK. "In order to grow their customer base, these companies must
automate the manual processes needed to provision and bill for new
services."
"This is because the added complexity of supporting more
users will increase the chances of human error and significantly impact customer
experience," he added. "End users must have 'self service' SAAS, meaning they are free to administer their own
services instead of having to contact the vendor to purchase or remove
applications."
The report from Gartner draws similar conclusions, stating
that SAAS vendors looking for new customers,
or client retention, "must focus on truly delivering lower TCO, facilitating
easier deployments that negate the need for expensive consulting support and
providing more robust integration strategies." In other words, SAAS applications that focus on being simple and
intuitive for users.
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