So-SAAS or the real deal?
February 9, 2008
Last week, Ed Molyneux and I briefed Dale Vile of Freeform Dynamics. As someone who has been on the analyst side of the fence I know it can be a nerve wracking experience. Dale has no illusions about many of the saas/on-demand services he sees and which he described in The Register in these terms:
When I challenged some of the purist SaaS thinking in a blog post recently (see Dissecting SaaS), I got a lot of phone calls and emails from SaaS providers offering to ‘educate’ me on how their particular service was as an example of why the SaaS delivery model was so compelling. After listening to a few of these stories, I was still singularly unimpressed with most of what I heard – essentially far too much ‘me too’ reinventions of traditional applications that typically did less than the solutions they were supposed to be replacing.
This is what Phil Wainewright (who we will be briefing next week) calls So-SaaS. Ed was demonstrating FreeAgent which now has just shy of 500 registrants and is transitioning beta testers onto a paid regime at a steady clip. Dale liked the fact the service puts the user in control or, as he prefers to say:
Interestingly, if you look at service provider authored SaaS applications in this way, i.e. by asking what new they bring to the party in terms of capability, then the SaaS delivery element sometimes becomes a bit of red herring. Will offerings like FreeAgent, for example, be successful because they are SaaS-based or because they fill a gap? – in this case the need for ‘cut the crap’accounting, billing and tax management designed for IT contractors and the like that are not well served by traditional players like Sage.
We believe there is genuine value in cloud computing models especially where it allows for easy collaboration between interested parties. That’s why we encourage professional accountants and customers to work together to get the best out of the system.What is more interesting though is the manner in which our support systems are developing. We use another cloud service, GetSatisfaction.
What we’re seeing is very different to what I expected. Support systems are usually peppered with bug issues that don’t get fixed in a timely fashion and which leave users befuddled. We’re finding that a combination of fast response times (many queries are answered with a few hours) plus appropriate acknowledgment of problems leaves almost all customers happy with the service. We’re also receiving interesting questions about treatment of individual expense line items. That’s unusual. This sometimes strays into the professional accountant’s turf but wherever possible, we provide an answer. Where we can’t, we will happily refer it to a professional who understands the FreeAgent value proposition.
Why is this working as an alternative model for support?My sense is that a combination of cloud models enforces a level of transparency which we cannot avoid and should embrace. Transparency keeps you honest but more important forces the service provider to exercise a level of care that is not required when the service is disconnected from the user. At the very least, it forces other players to question the value of their delivery mechanisms.
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“So-Sass” resonates. Its not how you deliver it, but what you deliver that matters. That is equally true of support - which is something that many vendors get wrong.
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