The other day I started the discussion on Jamcracker with a post about how their Pivot Path product can help a Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor get their service to market. Pivot Path supplies an administrative platform for on-demand software vendors. It's a software platform that eases the process workflow of bringing new clients onto the system, really a soup to nuts approach. Yesterday''s reflected on how SaaS vendors can continue to drive revenues and market share even as business software becomes more and more of a commodity. My answer to this is that SaaS vendors must be willing to form new partnerships in the marketplace with the goal of bringing more robust solutions to the market. This is the only way to drive more revenue and market share in an increasingly crowded market that no longer tolerates regular price hikes. In fact NetSuite just last week announced over 30 new partners, read more here. This is a promising turn of events and I expect that this will continue to grow over time. But this is not enough, unfortunately. It's great that 30 other SaaS vendors have agreed to play nice in the on-demand sandbox with NetSuite, but how are they going to get the integrated 'service bundle' to market? There will no doubt be deals where a customer elects NetSuite plus one of the partner products, but what if they want more than that? Channel partners like SightLines can do some of the heavy lifting, but frankly this is going to be a long shot. And what if you want to integrate 3 different apps with NetSuite's core CRM and ERP modules? Are you going to bring 4 different license invoices into the CEO's office, plus one for consulting and implementation? I'd like to see the face you present that idea to! Real 'service bundling' is going to place in a little different way, in my humble opinion. A conversation that I had today with Joe Krehel of local - Michigan - SaaS vendor, Trademaster sheds some light on what may be the next thing and how Jamcracker fits in. Trademaster has several different on-demand software services but the one Joe and I discussed was the red hot service for Fire Departments. B y law the Fire Department is supposed to inspect every commercial building in its jurisdiction every year. But with the burden of manual process, ancient technology and tight budgets, they're lucky to get the inspections done once every two years. So Trademaster comes up with a way for Fire Chiefs to enter the data in the field on a tablet PC and then upload to the hosted service when they return to the office. Shortly after launching this service they were asked about a new building inspection system for the Property and Assessment office. That service is on its way. But what if a Channel Partner, a service provider, wanted to bring Trademaster's products into a service bundle with on-demand applications for managing municipal finances and human resources (police, fire, road crew). In other words, a complete municipality software as a service bundle. How could this be done in a way that makes it easy for the buyer - one invoice, one support number, one point of contact, one sign on - and the seller - one contract to manage. That's the other half of the Jamcracker Pivot Path solution; pulling together several different SaaS offerings into a single bundle that provides a seamless whole system from the many parts. This is where the market will ultimately have to go to for SaaS vendors who want to continue to see their solutions adopted as part of ever more unified service bundles. In this configuration it is the Service Provider who takes care of the integration pieces and supports the system. They must, again in my view, also be willing to take first line support - you don't give the client 4 different support numbers to call. This is not going to happen tomorrow, but before long I believe that some of the larger channel partners will begin to take steps to mark territory as SaaS aggregators. If SaaS continues its adoption rate across all sectors of the marketplace, naturally clients are going to start looking for the vendor who can simplify the process and offer a total service bundle. Jamcracker, anyone? | 
