Following my post on cloud adoption, Really Simple Systems sent me the results of an 862 person survey they recently conducted among mostly SME businesses. Once again results present a confusing picture. I sense that is in part because the questions asked were really a mixed bag that attempted to discover many aspects.
John Paterson, CEO and founder said to me in email: “…our latest survey (“62% of small companies are using social networking“) shows that, yet again, users are wary of accounting cloud application.” This is what respondents actually said:
Do you see the problem? Muddling ‘hosted’ with SaaS/cloud is bound to lead to confusion. I would have preferred to see respondents given a definition of what hosted means.
Putting that aside, the patterns this survey reveals are interesting. It is no surprise that CRM leads the way since there has been much more noise coming out of Salesforce.com and others about the virtues of adopting SaaS based solutions in this category. The answers to the next question were more interesting still:
It is a pity respondents were not questioned as to why they have reservations. John speculates that:
Accountants are naturally more conservative that sales & marketing people
Although,as a CEO I’d rather lose my accounting system than my sales pipeline. At least I can rebuild the accounts from the paper trail of invoices and bank statements, although cash collection for some companies would be hit. Not for us, that is all automated!The range and depth of cloud CRM is a lot greater than for accounting
There are fewer brand names with a credible accounting offering: KashFlow and Xero at the bottom end, Aqilla mid range, NetSuite at the top. Both here in the UK and in the US, the traditional vendors (Sage & InTuit at the bottom, Dynamics mid range, SAP at the top) have struggled with cloud. Mind you, the same could be said for CRM systems: ACT!, Goldmine, Pivotal, Dynamics were all leaders before the likes of SalesForce and ourselves arrived.The advantages of Cloud are more obvious for CRM
Accounting users tend to be office bound, CRM users work in remote locations and on the road. Cloud solves all those nasty synchronisation problems. And marketing systems can be more easily tied into web sites for new leads and tracking from pay-per-click and email programmes.
I partially disagree. Accounting is often viewed as business critical and I don’t know if John has ever tried to reconstruct a set of accounts from base documents after the event but it is a hell of a job. John also misses the critical point that the vendors he refers to as ‘struggling’ have had an institutionalised DNA problem when it comes to developing for SaaS/cloud. While he is correct about the office bound nature of many who fulfil accounting functions, I see that trend changing with more businesses prepared to offload to professional advisors. Where customers use SaaS/cloud solutions, they are also more likely to share with advisors in an effort to better understand what’s happening in their business.
Regardless of how you view these results my overwhelming sense is that reticence is a result of poor market execution by vendors. I consistently hear potential customers say they don’t understand the full potential of moving to SaaS/cloud. However, when it is explained to them, they usually ‘get it.’
This is a topic I will be speaking about at an upcoming CIMA event. More details later.
Thanks to John for sharing the full results because while I sense confusion, it provides yet another set of data points that are worth reviewing.
