Suddenly

Songs have been coming into my thinking a lot these days. The title comes from a word in Yesterday.

During the week I attended a shootout between two SaaS solutions. Each had to walk through a sales lead to cash business process in three steps. Each took it in turns to show a step. Part way through, one of the presenters had to resort to slideware rather than using the live system because around 5,000 other people were hitting the test system at the same time and it was playing havoc with the data.

It provided an ah-ha moment.

SaaS is fundamentally different to on premise in many ways. This shootout demonstrated very clearly that unlike on-premise software, you have to show a live system as your demonstration or you lose credibility. There isn’t a choice. It means that buyers have a direct way to assess whether a system is likely to have the capabilities they require. Too often in the on-premise world, customers are led into believing that a vendor can do something only to find that configuring or customizing are difficult. With SaaS you can usually see straightaway whether that thing you really want is going to be there.

Similarly, if the vendor has a partner ecosystem then you can also test whether partner solutions will work as described. In addition, you can see how your costs might escalate and whether that will represent value to the business. That’s very difficult with on premise where you often have to implement before you know.

It’s a great transparency differentiator and one that vendors should exploit.

Now all we need are well executed partner and pricing catalogs as helpers to potential buyers.

UPDATE: Gartner analyst Jim Holincheck references similar thinking (see comment.) The important point is here:

The emergence of SaaS and Cloud Computing is going to change that.  It will literally put the customer in the driver seat.  Instead of vendors doing scripted scenario-based demos, I see vendors setting up “sandboxes” where customers can run their own scripted scenarios with coaching and assistance from the vendors as needed.

Tagged as: Business process, Software as a service