SaaS/Web App Administration
Our research of 26 mid market public companies shows that 20% had 10 SaaS or web apps per each worker, with the average number of SaaS or web apps per worker standing at 5. And that number is expected to more than double over the next 18 months. No wonder CIOs are searching for effective ways to manage this.
The app-centricity of today's enterprise IT is fueled by the rapid adoption of mobile devices and cloud computing. Tablet are seeing a similar flood of mobile apps experienced by smart phone users – except these apps will speed up and automate many niche solutions that collectively will affect worker productivity in significant ways. The handwriting is on the wall that SaaS and web apps will continue to proliferate at a rapid pace. With that comes the need for a coherent way to manage them efficiently and securely. And in a manner that takes into account the fact that the users of these apps may be full time employees, part time, contractors, or consultants.
CollabPort provides a framework through which any SaaS or web app can be offered to users but managed in a consistent way. Thus CollabWorks can provide enterprise customers agility in a rapidly changing environment and flexibility to select only the desired services. This requires the ability to easily integrate any SaaS or web app into the CollabPort framework.
During our research we discovered that most of the SaaS apps were purchased by Business Units (BUs) and often managed by them. Frequently, IT executives had no visibility as to usage or the productivity value to the worker. Of the 70 SaaS apps that were identified through the research, the top 15 most popular apps such as SalesForce.com amounted to 50% of the implementations while the remaining 55 SaaS apps amounted to the other 50%. Many of these lesser-known SaaS apps do not have APIs to automate administration and in general, there are too many such apps to make a case-by-case manual integration effort practical.
In order to provide a complete one-stop SaaS management solution, CollabWorks relies on two outstanding alliance partners. Symplified provides secure authenticated single-sign-on capability while Kapow Software brings web to web connectors for application integration and analytics. Both companies have proven Global 2000 customer successes. Together with CollabPort's highly versatile application framework and decision making module, a one-stop SaaS management solution becomes a reality for enterprise customers with an exciting roadmap that would keep up and serve the ever-more virtualized enterprise.
The CollabPort SaaS manageability features:
• Authentication
• Access Control
• Federation
• Single-sign-on
• Provisioning
• Auditing/Reporting
• Identity Integration
Authentication and Single-Sign-On: The CollabPort authentication and single-sign-on capability offers the same level of abstraction as iPhone and iPad – namely each worker logs into a portal once and all business and professional apps are presented in an intuitive U/I. One click on the software icon and the application is launched.
Application Integration: All your web applications can be connected even without APIs for that purpose. This reduces complexity as the number of applications per worker grows and also reduces on-boarding and off-boarding of internal and external workers to minutes.
App Replacement: One concern expressed to us by IT executives during our research was vendor lock-in. For example, once invested in a CRM system, removing that data could take weeks or months with potential errors. CollabWorks can demonstrate automated web to web connectors that dramatically reduce the time and improve the quality of data recapture and vendor replacement.
Through CollabWorks collaborative enterprise network participants can share connectors, vendor performance, and worker optimization analytics.
