Watch out for that bus

The working title for my upcoming presentation at the CloudAdvocates event is: ‘Your clients are already using SaaS, are you prepared?’ It’s a fairly innocuous title but one that belies what’s going on.

In a conversation with a colleague this week he said: “The iPhone didn’t exist before June 2007, today they’re creaming the competition. Nokia was king and look what’s happened there and as for Motorola, the grand-daddy of them all?’ Stick with me on this one.

I remember when iPhone came out I was sceptical. I simply could not believe that the iPhone would knock the corporate incumbents off their lofty perch. Robert Scoble thought iPhone would ‘rule the world’ and destroy the existing handset business, then dominated by two names, Nokia and Blackberry. He camped outside an Apple store with his son to ensure he was near first in line to get one. I thought he was nuts. Shows how much I know but then fast forward to today.

Android phones are being activated at a rate of 550,000 a DAY. According to some reports, Android is number one in 35 countries and approaching 50% market share in others. Last week, Apple opened up an appstore for business applications. SAP, Oracle, Salesforce.com and even Xero are placing apps into the store. Many of the current crop of apps centre around simple functionality or reporting but sooner or later they will embrace much of the functionality you find on laptops and desktops. I am for instance seeing really useful applications like the ability to take a picture of an expense voucher and have that attached as an upload to an expense request. It’s a small piece of functionality but is incredibly valuable to users.

In short, the smartphone IS the computer of choice for many and vendors will have to work hard to keep those customers happy with new apps supplementing or replacing the old.

Separately, I know that the main players in the UK SaaS space: Xero, FreeAgent and KashFlow are all heads down racing to capture as much market share as they can. Some of the numbers that have been reported to me under non-disclosure are mind boggling. These are what we analyst types call mega trends. They’re huge. They are ground shifting. They have widespread impact. In aggregate, they are scooping up customers at a rate that far exceeds anything I have seen in the market before. unlike competitors, they are not having to acquire to achieve those levels of growth. Elsewhere, Freshbooks reports more than 2 million users. Salesforce.com has just passed 100,000 customers and millions of users. NetSuite just signed its first global, multi-million dollar, multi-year deal. FinancialForce is on track to break all past records…the list goes on.

From the accounting apps side the impact is not immediately obvious until you notice that NatWest has an iPad app for managing your money that is currently being heavily promoted on prime time TV. It’s a small leap from bank accounts to accounting information in an economy that is increasingly become service centric and mobile.

Elsewhere, Rick Telberg is recording preliminary findingss about client satisfaction. The picture is not good:

Preliminary results from a new CPA Trendlines survey show that only 16% of clients say they’d be “highly likely” to recommend their current CPA firm. That’s down from 23% in 2009, a loss of 6 percentage points, or, more graphically, a 26% rate of decline…

…CPA firms appear to be running high risks in assuming their clients are happy. For instance, 35% of CPAs this year say that could get good recommendations from “nearly every client,” up from 29% in 2009. Compared to the 17% of clients who say they might actually recommend their current CPA, CPAs seem to be dangerously over-confident.

But then, how would CPAs know?   Some 52% have no regular system for checking on client satisfaction. On the other hand, 28% of CPAs wish they had a better system in place for tracking client satisfaction, up from 24% two years ago. So, despite the fact that awareness of the problem is increasing, more firms are failing to act.

What do customers want? Service. Firms know there is a problem but many are not acting.

One of the consistent findings in my ongoing conversations with clients and professionals is that SaaS/cloud provides the kind of ‘customer touch point visibility’ that clients want. You cannot achieve the same using on-premise technology.

OK – that’s the backdrop. The cloud bus is barreling down the street towards you. Are you ready? What should you do? Is there a one size fits all strategy that will work? Those and other burning questions will be answered at the seminar. It won’t be comfortable listening for some in the room but then this ‘stuff’ is disruptive. I’m planning to give some time for Q&A so get your questions ready. It’s free so there is no excuse for not signing up.