Solid businesses must be transparent

Internet-hosted applications are not just about low maintenance and access from anywhere. A spin-off benefit is that they are potentially accessible to customers and partners.

I came across a compelling example of this at Microsoft’s Architecture Insight conference last month, during a session on software-as-a-service (SaaS). One of the delegates was Simon Hazlitt from a small fund management company called Majedie Asset Management. He told us that Majedie’s IT strategy has been based on SaaS from its foundation in 2002. Initially it was obvious benefits such as low startup and maintenance costs that appealed, but the ability to share information soon became important too.

“Firms in the City have this great big concrete block around their information. And the people with whom you should be sharing, your clients, aren’t allowed to do it. We share our applications; we use Active Directory to sign in, so do our clients, and they sign in to the same thing.”

This chimes with last month’s AppSpace announcement from the on-demand CRM provider Salesforce.com. Chief executive Mark Benioff describes AppSpace as “MySpace for the business web”. It allows Salesforce customers to create an instant portal into their online applications, and includes simple workflow capabilities.

I like the broad direction AppSpace represents. It becomes especially interesting when combined with custom applications written in Apex, the server-side language that is now part of the Salesforce platform, and has potential beyond CRM. The ability to integrate third-party applications from the Salesforce AppExchange is also important. It is worth noting that AppSpace is only a pre-packaged form of something you could build yourself using the Salesforce web services API.

The move to hosted applications promotes new ways of doing business that are more transparent and immediate, irrespective of whether you use Salesforce and AppSpace, or some other platform. When shopping online, some stores are more transparent than others. The worst examples do not let you order directly. You have to email or call for a quote. Others let you order, but do not reveal whether or not the product is in stock. Finally there are retailers who show actual stock levels. These are the ones I go back to, especially when combined with detailed order tracking that lets me check the status later. In other words, my preferred online retailers are those that give me the most open access to their data.

Sharing data and opening up internal systems is a bold step, but it is good for business.