Hello Penelope,
A very interesting article. I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis and the comments of Ray Wang. I am beginning to see more instances of software and services being procured by the business with IT being just a support and delivery channel that needs to work with, scale and integrate whatever solution the business has chosen.

As much as anything I think the success of the SaaS model will actually be determined by the SaaS vendors themselves. They have the potential to either conquer or crush their own delivery model. The smart SaaS vendor has to consider not just the service that they are delivering but also how the service can be scaled and integrated into the corporate IT environment. SaaS solutions need to have the low cost of entry and quick delivery of business value that makes them appeal to the business, while at the same time be capable of becoming a part of the business's IT infrastructure when use of the solution becomes integral to the running of the company.

This is where we are going with the Anderson Zaks managed service processing card authorisation and settlement transactions. We will soon be offering an entry level solution that would allow a merchant to sign up and start processing electronic payments within a matter of hours. This would be a low integration solution delivered as a standalone software package or into a browser via an Internet connection. As integration needs become greater we will then offer a tighter integration that still utilises primarily our offering, but delivered as brand-able, open-standard components and services that can be made to appear part of the merchant's solution but still remain part of the SaaS package. Finally, as tight integration is required we then expose the underlying functionality via open APIs such as SOAP based web Services that IT can easily integrate into their core products and solutions.

By adopting an SaaS offering that contains this scope for scalability and integration we help alleviate the "choas" of future integration. We provide an offering that appeals to the business from an initial cost/value perspective but is not scary for IT when it comes to integrating the SaaS offering into the core business IT infrastructure.

Alas in Retail, merchants mainly rely on their EPOS solution providers to provide EFT functionality, and they on the whole are sticking with their legacy software domaines.

However over the next five years I agree that this may all change.

Kind regards

Iain High
Managing Director
Anderson Zaks Limited