Service Now.com has a neat SaaS model for IT service management. According to the website they provide the following applications in a subscription model:

 •  Incident Management
 •  Problem Management
 •  Change Management
 •  Release Management
 •  Configuration Management (CMDB)
 •  Request Management
 •  Service Catalog
 •  Knowledge Management
 •  Service Level Management
 •  Asset Portfolio and Contract Management
 •  Project Management
 •  Discovery (optional, additional charge) 

They have a full demo that does not require registration. Try it out!

 Financial times : " Cloud computing is threatening the business model of the Indian IT outsourcing ….". As if we needed one more negative story with all the bad news about the economy. There are two sides to this cloud thing. Let's do a reality check.

- Hit on the package implementation business : SAP goes the single instance multi tenant way. Nobody spends millions doing SAP implementations and a handful of administrators configure a single instance for many customers. This will surely kill the customization revenue that outsourcers enjoy. Reality check - The "On demand" buzz is really aimed at expanding the market to small and medium sized businesses. Here's a snippet from the SAP website " SAP Business ByDesign is fully integrated business management software designed for midsize companies or small businesses that want the benefits of large-scale business applications without the need for a large IT infrastructure. It enables preconfigured process best practices for managing financials, customer relationships, human resources, projects, procurement, and the supply chain. SAP takes care of installation, maintenance, and upgrades – so you can focus on your business, not on IT."

Two things stand out : a).Midsize and small businesses and b). Preconfigured processes. I have in the past blogged about the focus Indian outsourcers have on large clients. In fact >70% of the revenues come from clients that contribute >$10M to revenues. Surely not SMB's. Secondly, "preconfigured"  business processes imply a certain level of commoditization. The availability of a "preconfigured" SAAS alternative for a business process does not change the reasons that made you spend many millions customizing it before the SAAS alternative came along. SAAS is good for the commodity processes but not for something that is your secret sauce. Indian outsourcers make money by helping large customers with complex package customizations and that market is not getting "SAASified".

-Hit on the maintenance revenue stream: Before Clouds you'd have 10 teams of 10 people each maintaining 10 apps for 10 customers. If these 10 customers were to sign up for one Cloud based solution, you'd have 1 team of 20 people maintaining one instance for these 10 customers. Very plausible for commodity processes like email, but what about the systems integration revenue for integrating the cloud based app to what's in house ? Cloud can give offshore vendors a fresh revenue stream through systems integration.

-Private Clouds: If the secret sauce business processes need to get a cloud fillip, most large enterprises would prefer a private cloud. Outsourcers like Wipro Technologies with data centers in the US and deep existing relationships are ideally positioned to leverage the private cloud opportunity. This increases the value of the outsourcing relationship.

Full disclosure: I am an employee of Wipro Technologies.

Check out the SOA India 2008. Details are here. Last year I attended the JAX India conference hosted by the same group and it was decent. Here are some of the topics they plan to cover this time.

Emmy says it is surely possible. John argues that SaaS projects simply can't be offshored. He sites high responsiveness, Internal code consistency, customer-collaborative product development, far lower maintenance effort,
System engineering and speed to market. Raj is of the opinion that SaaS delivery models would provide an alternative to offshoring. What do you think ?