Look for these six enablers in SaaS to support your OneEcosystem™ ambitions

The situation: CEOs and CIOs must find new value in open collaborations with like-minded partners in HFS’ OneEcosystem™. You need to build effective connections across those ecosystems. This emerging enterprise need creates a new requirement for software designed to deliver connections across OneEcosystem™—ecosystem-native SaaS.

This document identifies and defines six enablers you should demand as you select the software to build out your OneEcosystem™. You will need this software to deliver the customer, employee, and partner experiences for growth in global markets. With it, you must be able to share workloads, data, and processes via the cloud across your purpose-aligned ecosystems. Investments in cloud-based software, or software-as-a-service (SaaS), whether purpose-built for the business or acquired from an independent software vendor, such as Microsoft or Adobe, must align to these outcomes.

Software brings together the OneEcosystem™

As you consider how to progress from “becoming digital” to “adopting a OneOffice mindset” and onward toward operating as “OneEcosystem™,” you also must look at your SaaS tools, essential to linking core systems and data with employee, customer, and partner experiences, shown in Exhibit 1.

To do this to the greatest effect, the tools must serve the OneEcosystem™ by capturing, managing, and delivering data so more of the right information reaches the person who needs it the most—wherever they sit within your OneEcosystem™.

Exhibit 1: The evolution from OneOffice to OneEcosystem™ adds the new dimension of partner experience to employee experience and customer experience

Source: HFS Research, 2022

The first step for companies is to align their tools (SaaS) with those their closest partners are using. By doing so, processes, data, and workflows will become increasingly frictionless across enterprise boundaries. This is not necessarily all about buying from the same vendor; rather, it is about what partners need the software to do to drive business and how that software securely exposes the data essential for your business to operate in the context of your partners, customers, and ecosystem.

It is only by understanding the role of SaaS (as a tool), data (as insights), and cloud (as a means of delivery) in your business operations that CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs can be on the same page when it comes to optimizing their towers of software and services delivery. Leaders can then craft the right request for proposals (RFPs) and align software and services providers around a common goal that best meets the aims of the business and its ecosystem.

To achieve this common goal, management must have a clear, shared vision of the six enablers of SaaS and the OneEcosystem™. Exhibit 2 reveals the six enablers. The following sections describe how these enablers are relevant to today’s business and your efforts to modernize operations, partnerships, and technology to deliver value for customers and partners.

Exhibit 2: The six enablers SaaS must offer to support OneEcosystem™ ambitions

Source: HFS Research, 2022

The more of the six enablers your SaaS offers, the more it helps you realize your OneEcosystem™ ambitions

Organizations are increasingly defined by their software choices. As we step into the OneEcosystem™ age, it becomes more important than ever to select software best-placed to support your build-out of ecosystems. We have identified six enablers that will define ecosystem-native SaaS:

SaaS must align with your purpose

When software becomes how most things get done, it takes on a cultural significance for the organization. Business leaders must ensure the software they select fits their enterprise purpose—or select for its ready adaptability to it. This is an opportunity for enterprise leaders to make their purpose real and differentiate their business. You will illustrate your purpose with everything from how software manages every aspect of your environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies to how your software interacts with your data, employees, customers, and partners. SaaS must align with your purpose, or you risk building an ecosystem that is, literally, not fit for purpose. Of those leaders who consider ecosystems a high or strategic priority in Exhibit 3, 32% place addressing a societal challenge (economic inclusion, climate change, and UN sustainable development) among their top five reasons for taking an ecosystem approach. These leaders will choose partners who share these goals and manifest this in the SaaS and services they offer.

Exhibit 3: Those leaders who consider ecosystems to be a high/strategic priority rank the following as their top reasons for taking an ecosystem approach.

Sample: 158 C-level executives across Global 2000 enterprises
Source: HFS Research, 2022

End-to-end autonomous processes are essential

Businesses must run end-to-end processes to be successful, as witnessed in the rise of HFS OneOffice™. In a 2021 study of 500 Global 2000 enterprise leaders, 82% told HFS Research the OneOffice mindset was either mission critical (24%) or very important (58%) to their company’s operation and strategy. Exhibit 4 shows 90% of leaders are now looking toward an ecosystem approach—and with it, the need to recognize that any customer lifecycle must inevitably run across businesses (and often across jurisdictions, too).

As part of the OneOffice mindset, business processes must be infused with data-led intelligence to make on-the-fly updates in response to changes in both demand and supply. Some 36% of leaders prioritizing an ecosystem approach rank creating autonomous supply-chain-driven transparency and efficiency in their top five reasons for doing so in Exhibit 3.

Cloud-native, containerized SaaS accommodates dynamic demand

SaaS was built for the cloud. It’s easy to roll out, scale up, and manage. It has evolved into an integrated business tool supporting operations, information, and workloads across platforms, databases, and processes. OneEcosystem™ brings a new dynamism to the demands placed on a business. SaaS aligned to the application containerization of cloud-native (in which applications are broken down into microservices and packaged in lightweight containers to be orchestrated across a range of services) is well-placed to handle this increased dynamism. The pandemic drove an urgent cloud agenda for most enterprises as we scrambled to enable staff to work from home. In our Pulse Survey (H2 2021), modernizing IT to get fully into the cloud was the second biggest of the major changes leaders saw for their organizations for 2021-22.

Interoperability with partners, customers, and even competitors is critical

All future SaaS investments must be designed to interact with other software. As you adopt tighter connections with your partners and customers, the requirement for software to connect with their SaaS to exchange and respond to real-time data becomes mission critical. SaaS must not be allowed to set the limits of your ambitions. Thirty-two percent (32%) of leaders rank cooperating with competitors rather than competing as a top five reason for building ecosystems (Exhibit 3), and interoperability is essential for this.

Exhibit 4: How the pandemic has changed the relative importance of ecosystems for organizations

Sample: 158 C-level executives across Global 2000 enterprises
Source: HFS Research, 2021

SaaS should help build stakeholder community

Ecosystems bring together partners with a shared purpose. To fulfill that purpose, the employees, customers, and partners must all shape a shared future state of operations. Leaders should favor SaaS vendors ready to bring their expertise in domain expertise, community building, problem identification, and collaborative solution building—applying these efforts to build out an ecosystem of shared value. Exhibit 3 shows 31% of leaders rank “Empowering and enabling a community” among the top five drivers for their ecosystem. “Removing bottlenecks and inefficiencies created by intermediaries” accounts for a further 32%, which can often be best tackled by the kind of collaboration that communities enable.

Embedded security and governance features foster trust

With a growing dependency on others, security and governance are essential. Embedded software features like distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), also known as blockchains, can help make trustworthy and secure ecosystems a reality. Ecosystems will use machine learning (ML) and algorithm-based smart analytics to make sense of the vast amounts of data on the ecosystem network. SaaS must interoperate with these to support the automated decisions aligning with your organization’s purpose. Exhibit 3 shows that diversifying risk among ecosystem players is a top five reason for ecosystems for 34% of leaders prioritizing ecosystem. DLTs can ensure risk is distributed appropriately through a network.

The Bottom Line: Choosing the right SaaS solutions will make or break the effectiveness of the OneEcosystem™ connections you build.

Ninety percent (90%) of C-level executives across Global 2000 companies tell us ecosystems will be even more important to them as we emerge from the pandemic (Exhibit 3).

To achieve OneEcosystem™ success, leaders must understand it will be their SaaS tools, not just their executive relationships, or contracts, that will deliver the goods.

Leaders must look to both technology and software partners for guidance on how SaaS solutions will enable them to deliver purpose, autonomous processes, cloud native, interoperability, trust, and community. It is clear to HFS that the OneEcosystem™ is not a future play; winning firms are acting now. SaaS will be essential to delivering the tools teams needs to get their job done—across the ecosystem.