Future of SaaS in supply chain

Filed in archive Research on January 15, 2009

Aberdeen just published the result of its recent study on Software as a Service (SaaS) for supply chain management. The report highlights today's quest in the market for cutting supply chain application cost as much as possible. One of the areas the companies are looking for more than ever is the area of application maintenance and upgrade.





Aberdeen has found out (as you see above) that companies are considering SaaS as one of the top 4 strategies to achieve such goal. SaaS, though in its infancy, is a promising model and Aberdeen estimates the market to grow. The report mentions some elements for successful adoption of the technology. Some of the elements which I found more interesting include:

- The roadmap for IT should consider not only TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) but also long term ROI. If we do this, models like SaaS come to the radar.

- API (Application Programming Interface) is important in SaaS vendor evaluation as you need to know whether the tools the vendor use can provide the type of the data you need and can be linked with your other systems.