Trend Radar 2008: SaaS Impact on IT Infrastructure

As we go into the era of broader SaaS adoption inside the Enterprise, the CIO’s office has some new headaches coming, although overall, a simplification of the IT infrastructure is on course.

Imagine.

You are the CIO of a Fortune 500 company. Your organization has deployed Salesforce.com for CRM, Concur for Travel, Webex for Collaboration, and a host of other SaaS applications for various other niche functions. And in many cases, some of these applications are integrated with each other.

Now.

The Regional Sales Manager at your Atlanta office is on the phone yelling, because he has a presentation with Coca Cola, and needs to access Webex through Salesforce.com and be able to record and store the session. “It’s not working!!!!”

Go figure what’s broken.

My point is, in this federated environment, a whole new layer of infrastructure is now needed to keep things running, and that need is going to produce some interesting new companies.

This segment is a part in the series : Trend Radar 2008