Some of the SaaS vendors have forwarded me an email they received from AccountingWeb which says:
The following is an invitation to take part in a major product for the SaaS market next year and beyond.
In response to overwhelming demand from both our members and the vendor community AccountingWEB is proud to announce the launch of a comparative, ‘at a glance’ guide to web-based business software under the title “BusinessCloud Matrix (Accounting & Finance)”
The aim is to provide a single resource for accountants and businesses to get a clear overview of the products on offer in what is becoming an increasingly crowded and confusing market. It will take the form of an alphabetical single line synopsis of each participating system.
From the 4th January 2010 AccountingWEB members will be able to review participating software offerings in terms of the functionality offered…
…Each entry will be rated as absent, basic or advanced.
Where possible we will include independent user ratings accumulated as part of the Software Satisfaction surveys and cost per user per month.
Because we appreciate that the various packages are constantly evolving each participating vendor will be able to flag up changes to be verified by our team before the entry is amended. Equally entries will be ‘policed’ by members who will be encouraged to ‘report’ misleading entries.
Total cost for a twelve month presence will cost just £1,500.
As a service to participating vendors Sift Media editorial will be completing a ‘background report’ to flesh out the vendor’s proposition which can be attached to the vendor’s entry in the matrix– see notes below.
This is so wrong at many levels.
- It is a blatant ‘pay to play’ pitch of the kind that buy side people like myself know is fundamentally flawed. It is bad enough that many of the analyst firms operate this model but here we’re talking media where the advertising agenda is front and centre.
- The days of feature function comparison died in 1999. It’s a ludicrously simplistic model that tells users almost nothing of value. In any event, responsible vendors provide a basic functional description which should help buyers make an initial decision.
- AW will argue – ‘ah, but you can’t find this all in one place elsewhere.’ That’s the less than subtle vendor arm twister. If you’re not on the list, you’re invisible. Right? Wrong. SaaS vendors are proving adept at leveraging SEO.
- Modern vendor assessments are way more than simplistic lists of this kind. Regular readers will know that I place the emphasis firmly on references and buyer recommendations. That takes away at least some of the buying risk. These days, those recommendations are easily found on the Internet. Vendors will naturally leverage them so why do I need to spend £1,500 with AW?
- SaaS players are finding that vertical markets offer a better route to market than simply being ‘another’ book-keeping system. No feature function listing can accommodate that model.
- ‘Ah but we have major distribution.’ Yes – but who reads AND acts upon what AW says? That’s the big question. Like many communities, AW has plenty of subscribers but only a handful are active and even then all have an agenda of one kind or another. It would be a fool indeed who made a buying decision based on one data source. In the real world it doesn’t happen.
- Readers might say: ‘Ah but you’re media…you’re just griping.’ Yes, AccMan is media but no, I don’t do and never will do pay to play. Sponsors who choose to use AccMan are paying for real estate where they can showcase content. That’s a very different value proposition. Those services I do review are done with no vendor input beyond explaining what they offer. Vendors always have a right of reply but that comes in comments, not in my copy. That allows for total transparency between AccMan and vendors. Can AW say the same in this model? I think not.
UPDATE: It turns out AccountingWeb has done no sense testing with potential readers/buyers. They’ve simply cobbled it together internally. Their argument is that it will give smaller vendors visibility for their money: QED – pay to play. As I thought.
