Thanks to Zoli for pointing this out. Yet another business area has been introduced to the SaaS concept, SmartTurn have created the first Warehouse Management System (and yet another three letter acronym – WMS). WMS seems a fairly logical place to be using SaaS, it’s a discrete area of business, one that is often geographically diverse and one that has obvious connections to ERP systems which are already delivered via SaaS.
Interesting to see that the chairman of SmartTurn is former CEO of Salesforce (so he should know a thing or two about SaaS models), and the series A financiers are Emergence Capital who only do SaaS VC funding.
What is also really interesting is to see the enterprise SaaS space start to get filled out. As mentioned before, I’m presenting at the ICT Outsourcing summit in a couple of months. When first approached to do so, Salesforce was the only well known enterprise level SaaS provider and they were joined by a few specialist SaaS application (expense claiming, HR management etc). We now have SAP with it’s SaaS product BusinessByDesign, Netsuite who recently IPO’d with their SaaS solution and others waiting in the wings.
Enterprise needs to sit up and listen, we’re rapidly nearing the time where most enterprise functions can be provided via SaaS and enterprise organisations need to be prepared to venture into this new and exciting area.
Netsuite kicked of back in 98 but it probably wasnt until just after 2001 that they had WM features. I think even Computer Associates and Peoplesoft had offerings for at least 3 or 4 years now for mid market. SmartTurn might be the first multi-tenant variant?