What are the Current Trends Surrounding SaaS?

Rich User Interface Increased Connectivity and Data Management: The next major trend is increased connectivity to
the users business operations systems, and to other business systems.

Cross-Service Business Processes

The latest trends in SaaS are that one SaaS solution is the orchestrator of the other solutions, including handling all of the data transfers. In this model, the users get to focus on the part of the business operations that they need to, while the system handles all of the coordination.

Cross-Organization Business Processes

Single Sign-On : Another trend is managing access to multiple SaaS solutions. Another development is a set
of standards for security, called SAML, for Security Assertion Markup Language. This allows for security definitions to be exchanged and updated.

Single Billing and Usage Tracking: collecting the resulting billing and account statements and
consolidating them.

Service-Level Compliance:

Latest set of hosting tools and server farms provide advanced features for monitoring and management. They also provide reports against SLAs which customer CIOs require.

Managed Services are a Step Beyond Software As A Service

Managed services is the practice of transferring day-to-day related management responsibility to another organization. It can be a strategic method for improved effective and efficient operations. The person or organization who owns or has direct oversight of the organization or system being managed

is referred to as the offerer, client, or customer. The person or organization that accepts and provides the managed service is termed the service provider. Typically, the offerer remains accountable for the functionality and performance of managed service and does not relinquish the overall management responsibility of the organization or system. Examples of managed services used on a day-to-day basis in todays world include:

Payroll (as done by ADP) Shipping (as done by FedEx) Financial management (as done by Schwab).

In the IT space, the most common managed services include:

Strategic application management: ongoing management of core enterprise applications, such as SAP or Oracle, as well as legacy and custom-developed applications. Data center management: hosting and running operations. Asset management: tracking version numbers and licenses.

Managed services are carried out by a mixture of software systems and people. For instance, in Payroll, there are auditors available to check for process gaps or exceptions. In Shipping, the goods would not move without the people in the trucks and in the dispatch centers. In Financial management, the account managers are people who are aided by software systems to provide account management and advice. In Seruss world of outsourced manufacturing, managed services include the following: Business Services:

Master Data Modeling Financial Valuation / Costing Product engineering / Manufacturing coordination Operations Process Coordination Supply Chain Planning Application Change Requests Exception Management and Root Cause Analysis SOX Compliance and Audit Support

Support Services

247 Helpdesk Services Application Training

Application Services

247 System Application Monitoring / Trouble-shooting 247 Supplier B2B Monitoring / Trouble-shooting 247 Supplier Transaction Monitoring High Performance IT System Consulting Services Upgrade and Patch Management Services RDBMS Performance Monitoring and Tuning

These capabilities are far beyond the typical SaaS solutions which are handling leads in CRM, or tracking resumes and open positions in HR. Such typical solutions are basically performing recordkeeping. Instead, Serus is addressing business-critical operational issues associated with complex manufacturing processes including exceptions and multiple sources of information. We cover a scope from the product design stage to the financial reconciliation stage.

Our View of the Future

The SaaS revolution is well-established, and needs no further justification. However, the transition from single-point SaaS solutions that are in distinct silos, to the offering of complex SaaS solutions that span multiple parts of the organization, contain business processes, and proactively enable you to operate your business is the next important challenge for the enterprise software industry. There will be a shift to Software plus Services. Serus Corporation is well-positioned to be a leader in this transition, as we have already defined and implemented solutions that provide integrated SaaS and Managed Services