SPI Research has published a report on professional services pricing. According to a press release, the firm found that “SaaS consulting rates now surpass enterprise software realized rates by a wide margin.”

The report is based on a survey of 200 professional services firms.

Services Angle

Many organizations are looking to the cloud, including SaaS. Not everyone will need the sort of extensive customization that will lead to the costs described by SPI, but many organizations need do need consultants to do extensive work, and that that can add up.

However, as I mentioned earlier today, the way customers customize SaaS applications is changing. We’ve been watching as more SaaS apps adopt RESTful APIs and integrate PaaS features. Companies like Okta are cutting down on authentication and identity management issues. And SnapLogic is poised to completely disrupt the systems integration market by making SaaS integrations into a commodity.

Be careful what you pay to customize, and expect it to get faster and cheaper.