Asia Pacific began to gradually accept SaaS

In the past 6-12 months, businesses in the Asia Pacific region showed a growing trend that the IT department stopped boycotting SaaS completely and instead started to slowly switch to more pragmatic discussions, even though the current discussion is still More barely. In the next two years, I expect this trend to continue to grow. In fact, I believe many SaaS solutions, especially SaaS solutions that cross business and functional boundaries, will quickly fall into the broader IT portfolio, even if they were originally derived from IT.

As we have seen from many SaaS vendors' reports, more and more IT professionals are starting to participate in SaaS sourcing, requirements definition, RFP creation and negotiation. An example is the IT department procurement guide, which is clearly published by the Australian Government Information Administration (AGIMO). Do not misunderstand what I mean. In most cases, business decision makers are still dominant, and in determining how best to use SaaS-based services, especially in determining the business processes they need. But IT staff is more involved in the decision-making process, especially around related integrations.

In some ways, business decision makers need to think more closely about IT staff to better evaluate and negotiate with SaaS providers and other public cloud trading providers:

Demand sharing is driving businesses toward a more collaborative approach. Ironically, unlike some earlier hype around SaaS solutions such as total cost of ownership and ease of use, the business and IT departments are now starting to push closer together. As SaaS solutions become more strategic to core business units, the use of hybrid clouds and on-premise deployments becomes more pervasive, and consolidation and end-to-end process support become clearer. This in turn drives previous expectations for the unrealistic and overly simplistic SaaS solutions business, as well as the over-boycott of SaaS and the control of sensitive IT-driven ones.

IT departments need to do more than checklists. In most cases, the IT department may still be involved only in areas related to due diligence, such as security, bandwidth and network requirements; consider governance and accountability aspects as well as consolidation. In many cases, the role of IT is to provide a checklist without adding value. IT departments must be more actively involved in reflective and evolving IT role management technologies to deliver value to customers, regardless of whether the value is delivered through technology and infrastructure within the enterprise.

The mixed-use scenario will drive the expansion of IT involvement. In the next 12 to 18 months we will want to see more IT involvement in defining and mapping cloud computing architectures and ensuring that they fit in with existing systems, especially in hybrid cloud and in-house deployments. Emphasis or possibility The result that appears. The main considerations include single sign-on, monitoring, management capabilities, consolidation, and especially in business processes that can span multiple discrete departments, units or systems.

I expect multinationals' IT departments in the region to be among the fastest able to participate in SaaS purchases as their participation adds immediate value and supports the adoption of SaaS in the enterprise, while businesses in other regions are deploying in-house solutions. For SaaS initiatives dominated by local businesses and SMB businesses, it is more common for IT departments to engage in SaaS purchases, including the risk of alerting business planners that SaaS solutions purchased may not align with the overall value of the organization.

Michael Barnes is Vice President, Forrester Research Corporation, Singapore, and Director of Application Development and Professional Delivery Research.