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.

My fellow blogger Melanie has been waxing eloquently on both the state of grace which can be achieved by effective B2B data management only to reminded by another fellow blogger John about how far there still is to go in the integration space.

Both of these posts re-enforce (and refine with far more eloquence than I can muster) the motto of B2B Managed Services  – Make it Work.

John’s right there is a long way to go, and I was quite surprised to read the results of a recent Survey   that when asked what the #1 technology used to synchronize (sounds like integrate to me) with customers on orders forecast and industry status – the #1 answer (34%) was e-mail.  The #2 answer was (32%) was EDI so perhaps that means e-mail is used to handle the exceptions arising from the gaps still inherent in using EDI.

Since EDI still represents 85-90% of B2B transaction volume (Forrester Research 6-July 2007) the journey towards the kingdom of data heaven may be longer  than any of us think.   But take heart!  There is a road to get there.  It’s called Managed Services – using Data Transmission and Data Translation (the foundational components of B2B Managed Services) organization will be collaborate to exchange their business data , mange it’s quality and be able to take the steps to integrate into their business process.  

SaaS – Software as a Service is huge -A quick Google produced 1,620,000,000 hits.  Even SAP is jumping on the SaaS bandwagon – although not large customers.  (SAP Big business won’t be interested )

SAP is making the bet they can deliver ERP services using a SaaS model to small clients (100-500 employees.)  What struck me most about this announcement is the competing view from Larry Ellison    Larry Ellison Says No To SaaS – namely that he doesn’t see how he can create a business models using SaaS as a delivery

So what about a B2B Managed Service?  Can the core elements of Data Transmission and Data Translation between trading partners be delivered via an SaaS model?