One of the key value propositions for B2B Outsourcing is the ROI gained fromcontracting for B2B expertise and infastructure at a lower TCO than keeping all the people and infastructure in-house.   I’m not going to re-hash ROI model here as the growth of Managed Services sales (and those selling these solutions) is increasing significantly.   Instead I want to think about what it would take to deliver an outsourced Managed Service using the SaaS model.

 Let’s take the Data Translation component.  To fully leverage an SaaS model you’d need to provide an on-line interface to allow a user to define their input data, output data and the relationships between the two.  It would have to have drag and drop features so you could take the data values from the source format and place them in the target format.  You’d also need to be able to define the structure of the source and target formats.   The more I think about this  the more it sounds like taking an EDI translator software and hooking up a web-based front end to it.     You’d also want to have a facility to upload test data, run the translation, and validate the results.    

But if I’m doing all this defintion, testing and validation . . .where is the outsourcing?  So far this sounds like a lower cost of way of acquiring the translation software necessary for a B2B program - not outsourcing.