Hi Maarten,
Interesting discussion. I've been doing a lot of thinking around this area as well, and building up a series of blogs related to this.
First, don't forget IaaS, or from a customer perspective - modernizing on premise applications with cloud technology. The point of this is to improve company efficiency and agility in servicing these systems. These are the good old "systems of record" upon which SAP's traditional customer base is running. I also put ByDesign into this category because it essentially puts in place a system of record (a more engaging one) that provides benefits such as standardized processes and single source of information.
For the SaaS point of view - at least for the loosely-coupled applications, these are new "best practices" that can be "added-on" to existing company processes. This is an agility and efficiency play as well that provides "engaging" new capabilities that include more business users to interact with the company's processes - often via mobile applications. But this still optimization, not innovation. Taking a SaaS solution does it provide an advantage over any other customers that use these systems.
Coming into competitive advantages, there are two kinds I think about:
1) First mover advantage in adopting new best practices. This is the integration story. Integrating Customer SaaS applications to get a single view of the customer and efficient automation between SaaS point solutions is something everyone will need to do. But, few are doing it right now because its currently fairly difficult. The first companies to do this will have a temporary competitive advantage over those that don't. I also put SaaS applications from partners purchased from app stores to be in this category. Until most customers have the best of these apps, you have a temporary advantage. Likely this is where most of the economic opportunity for PaaS lies.
2) Competitive differentiation. This is whatever it is that your company does best that gives it an unfair advantage over others. This is where innovation has the most payback, and any advantages earned are more easily sustained as your company builds out its economic moat. By definition, if its a unique advantage, its custom. This is where PaaS has the most interesting stories to me.
This is why when I show a "cloud stack" diagram, I show systems of record on the bottom (either IaaS based or SaaS based), siloed SaaS applications "systems of engagement" above that, surrounded and capped by the PaaS for "systems of innovation".
Bluesky
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