Barbara Darrow has a good post up today talking about the recent moves by Salesforce.com, Netsuite and others to woo partners to resell their software as a service (SaaS) offerings to their customers. Certainly, a margin program for partners who do the demand generation work of getting a customer to purchase a SaaS solution is warranted, but many of these sales don't contain the broad spectrum of revenue and profit opportunities for partners and the partner participation will be limited until this improves through the availability of integration API's, toolkits for customization and other service opportunities, which is an area that Microsoft has traditionally done well and would be well served to bring to the SaaS game, whenever they show up.
Salesforce.com has done a good job of this with Apex , their application language that makes it much easier for partners to be able to develop custom solutions inside of Salesforce for customers, but this is still a development tool more than an integration tool, where partners typically shine. Building tools to integrate systems that reside at a customers site with SaaS solutions creations a natural solution sale for partners, whether it be integrating a CRM application with a telephone switch, building integration between workflow solutions like Biztalk applications and SaaS solutions or linking legacy custom systems to the SaaS solutions. The first vendor to get this right and match it with a program that rewards demand generation and customer renewals will find the love of the channel and the economic rewards that follow. Salesforce.com seems to be on the right path with Apex, but the program has a lot of work to do to catch up.
