In my first blog on Architecture Principles I talked about the most important one was “Keep IT simple”. This is why I believe the SaaS BoB (Software-as-a-Service Best-of-Breed) mania is going to hit a wall in a couple of years.
I love SaaS. But what is happening is that folks are splintering their end to end business processes into strung together SaaS solutions. Let me give an example. SaaS Vendor A does RFPs and RFQs for you. In the same process step, Vendor B does Auctions or Reverse Auctions for me because they are better at that kind of RFQing. Then these systems hand the next step off to SaaS Vendor C for eContracting. Once the contract is accepted Vendor D supports the actual PO creation. But before I create the actual PO I use Vendor E to optimize my inbound logistics to pick the best vendor out of the 4 I have with the optimal delivery date. Then we have Vendor F … and so on. This was all nice when each business department bought SaaS Vendor A-F and integrated the process manually. Now they realize that manually getting data from system A to system B to … is really inefficient. So they call IT and say please integrate and automate that all for me. Holy sh..!
Haven’t we been here before in the on-premise world? Department A built their siloed system, Department B built their siloed system, … As I said, I love SaaS and in my next blog I’ll give away how to avoid this sh..storm.
Here come the return of the 1990 - 2010 SAP’s and Oracle’s to the rescue. They’ll do their whole thing over again just consolidating siloed SaaS software vs siloed on-premise software. And the big consulting firms who didn't warn you about this mess will be right behind them with their purses wide open.
Am I the only one sitting in my comfy chair on the sidelines waiting for this to happen? Do you think I’m wrong? If I’m right when do you think the big bang is going to go off?
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