Jason Corsello points to a potentially significant business benefit from SaaS models. "Many on-demand vendors maintain valuable data across hundreds and thousands of companies. The ability to mine that data and identify industry trends, practices, and key success elements..."
Historically, vendors such as Oracle and SAP had some idea through survey work and through process benchmarking work done by firms like Hackett Group on features and business processes customer bases were using . But SaaS vendors have so much more accurate insight on feature usage in their customer bases. Clearly, cost benchmarks will still be elusive but business practice (such as 2 way vs. 3 way matching in purchasing/AP) information should become a lot more specific.
I hesitate to say "best practice" to describe what the average customer uses in their software but the data SaaS vendors collect should allow for much better alignment of customer usage and software features.
