Biggest verticalized SaaS portal launched in Paris at BATIMAT

I recently talked about the SaaS appstore deployed by the US government as being a major shift.

But what could be described as the first biggest vertical SaaS portal has been launched this week in Paris during the BATIMAT fair - the world's leading construction exhibition.

e-bat is a portal dedicated to the building industry and aims at providing software and services subscriptions to 60 000 small and medium French construction companies, that is more than 500 000 end users!

The portal has been initiated by the French Building Federation and is dedicated to helping face the dematerialization challenges by providing its users a comprehensive set of dedicated services ranging from Microsoft Exchange collaborative emails, Microsoft Office Suite applications, secure documents management, up to human ressources, financial mangement or payment solutions.

The users can customize their portal, subscribe, manage their online software services, and use those software solutions from anywhere, at any time, through a secured internet connection.

The portal is built upon Microsoft technologies - IIS, SharePoint, Exchange, Office, Remote Desktop Protocol, virtualization, and is hosted, and managed by YouSAAS, also being linked to this pure SaaS player's white labelled appstore information system. The portal embeds the OpenPortal meta directory component and its customization was developed by Decade.

The project not only offers a fully operational SaaS portal and ISVs connectors easying the integration of new solutions, but is also providing local support teams and assistance to conduct the needed change management and help the end users to catch this opportunity of being more profitable and performant.