Strategies for SaaS, Cloud Computing, Governance and Sustainability

The traditional software (on-premise) sales model relies on the both direct and indirect distribution, leveraging the indirect Channel (the Channel) to build a loyal customer base and to generate a large portion of sales. Value Added Resellers (VARs), and System Integrators (SIs) play a major role in the evangelizing, demand generation, pre/post sale activities and [...]

Software-as-a-Service business with all the virtues that it purports also demands that the service provider be agile. Agile, not only, in terms of the way product is built but delivered and managed. Unlike in the traditional software days, subscription revenue model requires that SaaS solution provider measure every process and continuously adapt based on the [...]

I was part of a small group of SaaS/Cloud leaders who got together to talk about Pricing strategies, organized by Lincoln Murphy (@lincolnmurphy). The group consisted of founders of early stage startups that were comparing notes with fellow startup leaders, on various pricing strategies that worked for them and virtues of each of them. Amongst [...]

Open Source software and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) represent the two real disruptions in the arena of enterprise software. In the last decade both have experienced real success and challenged the inertia that persisted in the enterprise software controlled by proprietary vendors. New business models, Product offerings have provided consumers with choices on both the price-performance as [...]

As SaaS becomes increasingly the preferred way for delivery and consumption  for all things software, incumbent on-premise vendors are feeling the heat to come up with their own version of SaaS application. Customers unequivocally convinced of the  cost efficiencies of the SaaS model are resenting the hefty support contracts. The challenge of coming up with [...]

We all have had those moments where we run into this need to urgently mail documents to someone, overnight, international and on-time. Fred Smith revolutionized that industry by providing a reliable service that people bank on to have their documents delivered on-time to practically all the corners of the globe. That was 20 years ago. [...]

2009 was a banner year for SaaS. With all the banter around Cloud Computing as an advancement in technology and it glories bandied around I would still be hard pressed to find a more compelling reason behind the larger success of SaaS – than the distressed economy. Companies with dwindling IT budgets ratcheted up the [...]

Social communities are all the rage these days. Armed with blogs, social communities, twitter accounts people across the world have flooded the internet with digital content that is shared, aggregated, commented all over the internet. Recognizing the benefits of crowd-sourcing, companies in the commercial, not-for-profit, research & academia, religious and government space alike are increasingly [...]

Established companies venturing into SaaS business or newbies starting off as SaaS companies have to deal with a lot of new and evolving challenges. Everything that you can possibly think of is different with SaaS model. To say that it is changing the software business is an understatement. Starting with delivery model, architecture, sales, support [...]

One of the key drivers of the SaaS model has been the transfer of risks, burden and costs of ownership from the software buyer to the software vendor. In a way, by adopting SaaS the customers are telling the software industry to get their act together and bear the risks for their own doing. For [...]

“Cost Savings” has been the key rallying point behind SaaS sales strategy and has been credited with much of  SaaS adoption to date. Most SaaS sales pitches  highlight the cost savings in the areas of licensing, implementation, and on-going support/maintenance. Some variant of the following value proposition have made up the slide deck. Lower upfront [...]

Automation of business operations drove the adoption of technology by companies to gain efficiencies and competitive advantage in the marketplace. With the operational areas automated, it led to the next imperative for companies i.e, leverage the large amounts of data being captured, stored, organized in various disparate business systems and deliver it to the right [...]

SaaS delivery model brings with a variety of benefits to customers. The financial benefits of going with SaaS becomes a key focus point during the Sales cycle. Some are obvious some are not so much. Here are some strategies to adopt to drive home the advantages of SaaS

Selling a SaaS solution requires a different perspective when compared to traditional software sales. Online-marketing, customer acquisition cost, metered billing, return-on-investment are all key. In fact, it is a whole lot different from traditional software sales you might have made so far. Here are some strategies to adopt to gain an edge over your competition.

In the last decade or so with Salesforce.com leading the charge SaaS has made deep inroads into every area of commercial business software. Starting with Sales applications then moving into other edge applications like Collaboration, Project Management, Document Management. In the last couple of years even core business processes like Human Capital Management (SuccessFactors) and [...]

John Wookey, executive vice president of SAP On-Demand shared his vision for SAP’s SaaS strategy in an interview with  InformationWeek. Given the multiple SaaS/on-demand strategies SAP has presented to date this new one creates some confusion. In the past SAP has always portrayed Business ByDesign as its on-demand offering albeit making it available only in [...]