GXS Insights

SaaS 2.0 @ GXS

By Bobby Patrick, SVP Marketing & CMO, GXS

The Software-as-a-Service movement is starting its next chapter: dubbed SaaS 2.0.  For businesses applying technology to compete–which is nearly every business large and small–this chapter will be especially appealing.  With SaaS 2.0, technology providers actually own solving the business problem, not just providing a customer with the potential to solve it–assuming they design it, implement it, staff it, and maintain it.

The first chapter of SaaS was a tremendous start. Google replaced the Yellow Pages and Wikipedia replaced Britannica. Their chief proposition of ease-of-access and rapid results easily dwarfed their paper-based, almost instantly out-of-date alternatives.  At GXS, we quickly adopted SaaS leaders as providers as well, such as Vocus for public relations, and Open Air for project management.

We are busy building for the next chapter. While we have 250 software developers cranking away at new code to build new features, we also have over 500 specialists spanning a variety of centers of excellence to ensure successful implementation and over 400 operations engineers eliminating both planned and unplanned downtime with great new capabilities such as dual-continent fail-over. The result is not a single CD shipped, a 350 page user manual, or endless sets of APIs to integrate.  We provide an end-to-end service level commitment. That commitment combines all of the people, processes and technology necessary to solve a business problem.  Our software code is the family jewel, but our people and processes are the secret sauce.

In B2B e-commerce, the benefits of SaaS 2.0 cannot be understated. We can now seamlessly integrate an enterprise running on SAP with hundreds of thousands of suppliers, each with varying technology prowess--from Quickbooks, to Oracle, to Microsoft Excel or communications abilities--from SOAP or JMS to JMS, to  Bisync or Async.  Of course, the technology itself does not solve it all.  We’ll even speak the languages of every party, from Portuguese to French to Mandarin.  We’ll provide high-value tools configured in local languages that enable the complete synchronization of a global supply chain. We’ll provide local user training seminars in Guangdong, China and anywhere if necessary.  And, we’ll back our work with an end-to-end service level guarantee.  We don’t require a customer to receive a CD, purchase expensive hardware, double-down for disaster recovery assurance, and build a multi-lingual support staff for 24x7 operations.

In SaaS 2.0, the proposition technology providers offer is no longer just a new widget or feature.  It is implementation speed.  It is business performance results.  It is extraordinary cost advantages.

With GXS Trading Grid® Ultra technology as the foundation, multi-lingual tools such as Intelligent Web Forms and Application IntegratorTM embedded, and new dashboard and analytic services measuring business performance, our investments are squarely focused on ensuring our customers benefit from the new propositions from SaaS 2.0 today.

This era of technology solutions will be more far-reaching and more significant than anything experienced in the last 20 years from the technology industry. Businesses everywhere, enjoy.