I can see it reducing missed or forgotten billings, a common problem in trades and services business. It will also make you and your organisation look professional. Saasu has a long history in the trades sector and also with Connect2field, and their founder Steve Orenstein so I was pretty thrilled to be given the chance to talk about this efficiency technology for Connect2Field and Saasu and what it can do for our customers.

I was chuffed to have the opportunity to connect with Ray on several occasions during his visit in Sydney.  Knowing Ray’s interest and expertise in the area of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing I invited him over to the Saasu office and introduced him to our CEO Marc.

Thanks for visiting us Ray and we look forward to seeing you when you’re next in Sydney.

Here is Ray’s excellent presentation delivered in Sydney for the AMPlify thought leadership festival entitled: “Why Enterprise Software Sucks and How Disruptive Technologies Converge to Change This”

]]> http://www.saasu.com/2011/06/20/disruptive-technologies-expert-r-ray-wang-in-australia/feed/ 0 http://www.saasu.com/2011/04/07/auscloud-forum/ http://www.saasu.com/2011/04/07/auscloud-forum/#comments Wed, 06 Apr 2011 21:34:11 +0000 marc http://www.saasu.com/?p=8834

I’ll be talking at the Auscloud Forum tomorrow on the topic of getting Saas-y. What is it and how do you build a business SaasBot for yourself or your clients. Come listen and find out.

The speech will discuss the stages of adoption and also the practical side of this. I’ll also give insights into actions people can take that don’t cost much or chew up much time that aren’t that well known. I’ll talk about tricks we use inside our own company to maintain a low cost of sale using SaaS and also some tricks you can use to truely test out SaaS vendor claims on their Saas-y products. I’ll share the podium with our good friends at Salesforce.com

Date: Friday 8th April, 2011
Time: Starting at 2pm and will go until around 5pm.
Location: NICTA Seminar Room – Australian Technology Park, 13 Garden Street, Eveleigh NSW 2015, Australia

The following presentation on this topic is from my talk at CeBIT Webciety this year. The topic was What web Web3.0 will look like. This is all about the "Data" and the "Data Generation". Concepts such as the Semantic Web, Data-on-Data and more recently the Datarati have evolved in recent years to deal with the concepts.

If you are interested in the data area and how to use your business data to influence your business then Will Scully-Power’s blog is a great read. Previously of MarkSydney (part of the M&C Saatchi Group) he is seeding a new business in the data space.

We generally upload our presentations to Slideshare. See ~ Saasu | Marc Lehmann | Peter Cooper

The Webciety pavilion focuses on web-based society. It features SaaS web applications like Saasu, mobile web, wikis, web communities, blogs, microblogs and other interactive Internet services which are making our lives increasingly digital and ever easier.

Webciety is a major success born out of CeBIT in Germany. All the Webciety participants are speaking at some point over the 3 days at the Webciety Pavilion. See the webciety speaking program for details. I’m speaking at 11:00am on Thursday the 14th on the topic of:

What will Web3.0 look like?
Web3.0 is in early stages, but the picture isn’t clear. Web3.0 is bigger than the sum of it’s parts and accordingly we have trouble seeing what it is.

Many thanks to AWIA for a great event and inviting me over to speak and attend. My talk was about ecosystems, and if there is one ecosystem you must join if you use technology in your business then it’s AWIA.

Here’s my preso I did at the conference which I have posted on slideshare.NET

If you’re a business owner I recommend attending conferences. The trick is to pick the eyes out of them. I only go to about three a year as either a speaker or a sponsor. So ruthless choices are required. My picks are Barcamp, Edge of the Web and CeBIT.

Edge of the Web is coming up in November (Perth, Australia), brought to you by the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA). It is designed for business stakeholders trying to create next generation business practices that utilise the web. The people behind Edge of the Web recognise that technology and the web are an integral part of the business model. So often I see business people who think their business is “what” they do rather than “how” they do it.

Nearly all businesses are hybrid technology businesses these days,
they are part technology company and part product or services. The “how” is all about technology.

I’ll be at the conference talking on SaaS (Software as a Service) as an Ecosystem for businesses to operate in. Having your business in the cloud is becoming an integral part of an effective “how” component in your business. Some smart cookies (and coincidently good friends and customers of Saasu) will be there also such as the Madpilot, Myles Eftos and Millstreams, Adrian and Rosemary Lynch. I also hear that Jordan Brock and his 5 Senses Coffee with be there. 5 Senses was at a recent Barcamp, and the coffee experience just made it ultra-pleasant between sessions.

If you are not sure if this applies to you then consider a sole trader services business as an example who has a large portion of what they do dependent on technology. Getting the books done, preparing marketing material, email, franchising, scheduling, managing inventory, procurement, network marketing etc. It’s all about technology.

If you want to get to Perth then Saasu wants to pitch in and help by subsidising the trip a little through a cheaper Saasu subscription. Just use voucher code AWIA-EDGE when you renew or signup to Saasu NetAccounts. We will add 3 months to your business file renewal date once we confirm you have registered for the conference*.

Edge of the Web is on 6th and 7th of November, Perth WA. AWIA members $395, non-members $450.

ASIDE: If you aren’t already an AWIA member then get on board. Saasu did and never looked back. We are now on their committee and can honestly say it has been a great expereience dealing with some amazing web savvy members and receiving so much businesses through our membership.

If you have multiple business files in your subscription it will be pro-rata calculated. Offer ends 6th November 2008. One voucher at a time sorry. This offer can’t be used in conjunction with any other offer.

One of our much admired customers, Working Solo’s Leah Maclean* posted on the event and made some good points so we thought it was time we let you know our thoughts on the topic.

What can you do when the Net goes down?

There are a surprisingly large number of ways to deal with the Net being down. It’s interesting how humans quickly find efficient solutions to problems that face them in business. Being a SaaS company, web connectivity is very important. If the net does go down it isn’t totally crippling, it’s just inconvenient because there are lots of options to deal with it these days.

If local wired internet access fails in your business try these steps -

1. Go wireless, most businesses have a USB wireless internet dongle or a WiFi internet account for sales purposes anyway
2. Go to the cafe, most businesses have a cafe nearby that offers their own (or sponsored) WiFi access or an internet cafe as per those used by the backpacker community
3. Go home, most people have cable internet at home now or if not at home then a close family member
4. Go to a partner, most businesses have close trading counter-parties that they deal with who wouldn’t mind you using a desk for a day
5. Go to a serviced office, spend a few dollars and get access at a bureau or a few weeks at a serviced office, they are surprising inexpensive
6. Go to your IT provider and ask them to lend you a desk and a net connection or recommend somewhere

Your fault or theirs? Thank goodness for SaaS

The above list translates to many alternatives as a result of having your data with a high quality SaaS provider because it is usually the subscriber (i.e. you) that has the problem. Sometimes, very rarely it is on the SaaS provider’s end because one of the connections to the NOC (network operations centre/center) fails. This is usually not an issue though because most of the tier one NOC’s have redundant links into them from different directions by different carriers in hardened cable carriers to different Telco’s and then once it gets to the Telco each of them has multi routes to their peer Telco’s too.

A good SaaS provider has meshing resilience. This meshing prevents any single (or multiple even) breaks impacting the total service. We wrote about our amazing strengths in this area recently.

As Transaction Cross Docking (TCD) becomes more common place (because it makes so much sense) this stuff is crucial because it will be global distributed connected communities of millions not just thousands that are impacted.

All this compares well to the old world where you had stuff on your local server and a power or Telco outage to your premises meant no business no email and moving your server the old way – with a forklift!

* Working Solo’s Leah Maclean works with small business to grow their confidence and their success. Leah is a design and technology advisor to clever business women who want to do more and know more in the online world.

In the contact screen you will see new icons you can click to check out your contact in various social networks covering over 200 million people already.

I’ll concentrate on LinkedIn today since it is the most professional centric network. Professional and Social Networking really is a far too simplistic simplistic way of describing LinkedIn.

Here are some observations we’ve made in recent times. We would love comment on these points as we believe this has ramifications for product development in Saasu applications. A lot of them relate to the fact your research can be anonymous but connections are permissioned.

If you need to know more about permission, start with Seth Godin because he wrote about it early and well. Permission marketing is changing the world.

Keep track of people you know and like

The simple and best reason to use LinkedIn. You know where people are as they move from one job or city to another. It can be everything from an online business intelligence assistant to an international (or local) research tool to an online CV/resume or yet another contact database. Best of all is it doesn’t stop there, you see who knows who.

Research accelerates the ‘getting to know you’ process for new contacts

LinkedIn closes the knowledge gap you have about candidates, employees, prospects, partners, suppliers and customers. This enhances the legitimacy of the contact. It accelerates you along the getting to know you curve. It can help move you a bit further ahead at your first face to face meeting because you already know more things you have in common, locations, employers, clubs, education, sport and more.

Get personal by de-institutionalising contacts

For a long time companies have not wanted to share ownership of customer and prospect relationships with their employees. These relationships have been owned by the company. LinkedIn allows employees (especially professionals with an eye to having their own business eventually) to de-institutionalise their contacts, taking back some of the dollar value from their employees balance sheet back to their own. A two edged sword of course. Transparency is the biggest winner.

Stay fresh reduce your contact half life

Keeping loose contact fresh is quite difficult. When systematised in a social network the expectation of freshness of permission is enhanced. When you hear from someone through LinkedIn your little shoulder devil says “this person is ok, because you permissioned them”. That same communication via phone would sometimes have the shoulder devil saying “Who is this person? How did they get my number?”. Permissioning extends credibility of contact.

Degree’s of separation permissioning

Linked in creates a new type of commercial relationship legitimacy. Invited recipients will tend to accept being network beneficiaries themselves. The established connection has value, an unrealised dollar value. It costs us anywhere from $0.10 to $100 to get a permissioned contact in most businesses so connections in social tools are real permissioned assets. Let’s be honest about this, it’s just good business. Participants in the LinkedIn community can monetise their connections via sales and marketing activities. This is the conversion of unrealised value into realised value because a certain percentage of those interactions result in sale and thus revenue. You are converting your virtual inventory of permissioned contacts into your revenue line. The beauty being that virtual inventory can be resold to, it doesn’t require a cost of goods sold entry to re-acquire another permissioned contact. Don’t think of it just as product sales. It could be a better career, some venture capital, a new partner, and of course selling your product.

Channel Degradation – BACN

If you plan to use LinkedIn for sales bear in mind that there is a direct relationship between frequency and value of the permissioned contact set you have. Your behaviour could become known as a commercial version of spam called BACN. Equally, as more participants use the medium for sales and marketing activities the value of the connections will diminish. You only have to look at the C2C social networks to see how this can happen. Permissioned spammers (BACN) looking for love from your wallet wears thin real quick.

New ways of looking at non-so-new information

Check out the company profile pages on any major company on LinkedIn. You can see who is who and any changes. Recently LinkedIn moved to formalise companies and organisations in their network for the benefit of data rigour, their members and themselves. It was a good move, it cleans up the problem where many users add they workplace to their profile resulting in 100′s of version of that work place where picking it from a list would be better. In short companies and organisations are now centrally managed. A great benefit of this is that the tracking of organisations over their lifecycle will be very accurate versus some of the rubbish you get from old style directory providers Yellowpages and Whitepages.

One the of great things about SaaS is the ability to opt-in permanently (or on a transaction by transaction) basis to information from a counter-party such as supplier, customer, employee or other legal entity you ‘trade’ with in a broader sense.

We call this automated exchange of information ‘Transaction Cross-Docking’ or TCD, just like the traditional cross-docking of pallets of physical materials in warehouses and distribution hubs when they are being transhipped from one location to another via a middle point. It was and remains very efficient but it is still constrained by being physical. Our TCD is virtual and so much faster and more powerful.

Think of it like the ground breaking work done with cloning dolly the sheep plus a lot more because is is virtual, global and instantly accessible.

It extends on some very old concepts such as EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) that have been used in (mainly closed or industry specific) trading networks for many many years. The automotive industry has been a heavy user of these principles since the seventies but it required lots of upfront investment and ongoing investment in technology infrastructure and teams. Lesser known but more influential has been the use of these technologies in trading for global capital markets such as in a world leading Australian based company I used to run.

This is not a new area for SaaS either. Saasu has been quietly working on it for about 15 months and the range of opportunities is huge. Some of our competitors have recently worked this out too so hopefully the market will learn faster about the benefits.

Cloning

At the simplest level, you receive a sales invoice from your supplier and click one button to post it in your records too. This is a step up from most alternatives because it saves re-keying effort and error risk. We call this cloning – ‘one click duplication’.

Connecting

At the same time as you clone, you may optionally choose to connect the two (distinct copies) of the (same) transaction permanently. Why? To ensure you are kept informed of changes on the originator’s end (supplier in this example). This is step up from cloning because it adds the value of change management. You may be notified of changes by the supplier and keep a record of those changes against the transaction. We call this linking ‘one click connection’.

You may also ask why two copies, why not always have one that is permanently linked? The answer is simple, this is one transaction but there are (at least) two parties to it, each are separate legal entities required to have their own records.

Automating

The next step in efficiency is optionally agreeing to do this (clone and connect with various options) for all transactions from that counter-party (e.g. supplier) automatically in future. Possibly also add-in an additional level of security for managing repudiation risk, public/private keys work well here. We call it ‘one click automation’.

Manage

Over time you can imagine these relationships with counterparties could get complex to track and manage efficiently. You need to ensure you have the right tools in place to ensure the longer term cost does not exceed the savings. More importantly, this new meta data on your ecosystem might be able to add value to your business more strategically – like benchmarking suppliers and customers.

Clone. Connect. Automate. Manage.

The great thing about SaaS transaction cross-docking is the low cost of realising those benefits, no big upfront investment or ongoing costs.

It creates a mini-ecosystem for your business just as auto makers (and trading system technology providers in capital markets) have been doing for years. This ecosystem gets extra efficiencies and retention benefits that those outside the ecosystem won’t get.

Here at Saasu we are working on all this and some even more sophisticated versions we think apply benefits to a few dozen industries. Not just as an isolated feature here or there but as a strategic multi-year multi-industry multi-release initiative that will deliver substantial business benefits in the short and long term.

A new level of competing. Bring it on!

If you have not seen Marc’s excellent recent post on Sustainable Business you should read it.

Today we will build on that article and take a slight tangent to focus on the specific use of SaaS (software-as-a-service) to improve your business and improve (not just simplify) your life with SaaS in three areas.

With SaaS we can develop more -

• Environmental Sustainability – reducing the pressure on the environment generated by your business activities
• Quality of Life Sustainability – in the sense of the impact working in your business has on your people
• Commercial Sustainability – knowing that most new businesses last less than three years in most countries and less than two years in many countries what can you do to reduce risk and improve best practice

The focus is on using SaaS to avoid the commuting into work every day, we are not discussing productivity savings yet, we believe that those are even bigger but read on and you will be amazed just how dramatic just the commuting savings are from SaaS.

Environmental Sustainability

The impact here is big, so big in fact it is remarkable but it takes a minute or two to really see it, here goes.

SaaS can reduce commuting, this is the single biggest benefit of SaaS to the environment in terms of carbon footprint.

If just 3 in 10 clients of Saasu.com can work from home (or arrange an online meeting instead of travelling) twice a month, the carbon savings are dramatic. Here are the maths per 10,000 clients:

24 (days a year) x 3,000 (commuters) x 40km (average km per return trip) = 2,880,000 km of travel.
At 3,600 km per tonne of Carbon this is 800 tonnes of carbon generated.

We should do some surveys of our client base and get some even harder data on this impact.

Quality Of Life Sustainability

Using the assumptions above, and if people work a 10 hour day including travel then we really really like the idea of 720,000 hours being put back into quality of life each year for every 10,000 users we have. Remember this is even before we help customers become more productive which we will cover in another article.

SaaS can help sleep & relationships – we can’t be so scientific about the personal quality of life value of a couple of days working from home each month but the simple ability to have 30-60 minutes more sleep, more partner, more children, more gym time leaves you working in a more considered way with a fresh mind – rather than spend 2 hours commuting which is the alternative – it must be good for you. Over the course of the year, that is a lot of additional quality time with your partner. Maybe not enough to help address the global growth in divorce & separation but it certainly can’t hurt.

SaaS can help obesity (ok so this is a stretch goal literally!) – If that time was converted into exercise instead of sleep we can help work on the obesity issues in most developed countries.

Saas can help financial health -If the commuting money is spent on fresh fruit and veg and home cooked meals because we have the time to do it, it helps our waist and our wallet simultaneously.

SaaS can help community health – If the time saving is spent on volunteer work in communities rather than commuting, imagine what you can build with over 80 person years of time – build a scout hall or a community centre or a youth education program or volunteer as coach for local sports clubs.

Commercial Sustainability

Of course, most of the time we spend working on the business we are thinking about money, but SaaS can also do more with a business than just manage the money.

SaaS can reduce risk – by delivering a proven business system of processes that brings the wider SaaS community of needs together in one place you are getting ideas for improving your business and ensuring compliance not just from us but from all the users of our products.

SaaS can improve cash flow – by increasing the rate at which your debtors pay you with email invoices and statements and follow-ups rather than repeatedly incurring snail mail delays. Also by improving your visibility on your cash needs with dashboard creditor and debtor information that is always there, every time you use the system.

SaaS can deliver improved inventory management – by increasing fine tuned accuracy on restock levels and having central point of control while using of multiple simultaneous distribution channels (e.g. shop, web, warehouse sale, Ebay) all connected electronically.

So, SaaS does improve life, not just simplify life!

Another new Software as a Service (SaaS) idea that might work for some of our business customers is Avatars.

Avatars are a digital representation of people. You find them all over the internet these days, in virtual worlds and increasingly in commercial use for customer support.

A more recent innovation however is the use of these Avatars to sell your products. In pre-sales not post-sales, as it is a very different area because people are less tolerant of poor quality voice or images.

We set one up recently to welcome new visitors to saasu. If you have any feedback let us know. It’s easy to get one for your own site.

The downside of course is that they appear less ‘real’, you can’t replace people. The upside is substantial in some industries. You can do many things that you can’t do with professional talent. For example support multiple languages and cultures within the same language with one ‘actor’, even try different text to test effectiveness. An area that we are sure will catch on.

The good providers even allow you to use their talent library of people from around the world as well as text to speech or even load your own sound file in WAV format or phone in if you don’t have a microphone use the telephone and pin number to record it.

This will be an interesting area to watch as the ability to tailor appearance such as hair type, eyes, skin tone and clothing merges with other technologies such as the hologram the Prince of Wales used recently to attend an overseas conference and present.

Prince Charles was criticised for his huge air travel carbon footprint recently so he solved it with a video recording that was converted to a hologram. It is only a matter of time before the 3d avatar meets the holgram and allows his to acheive the same result with a simple email. Perhaps with simple markups to recognise emotion.

Y-gen and late X-gen are most likely to be the demographics who will readily accept them. After all they look distictly like the characters you see running around in Second Life and the The Sims.

Saasu client data (and our own) sits inside some pretty cool technology infrastructure in an extremely high grade location with world class qualifications including some from financial institutions and government security organisations.

Just some of our technology infrastructure features -

• Guards on the front door
• Hundreds of cameras
• Concrete all round – including the roof
• Biometric security
• Multiple levels of steel access doors and cages
• Multiple levels of redundant power, telecommunications and air conditioning
• Laser smoke particle detection; not to mention
• 24×7 monitoring plus
• Heavy duty protection from ram raids and even plane crashes

That helps us well sleep at night and we think it helps thousands of our users to sleep well at night too.

We also had yet another client with laptop problems recently. This follows a long line of similar client problems with their equipment being lost or stolen from client offices and cars not to mention dropped or broken laptops. All these events mean their business is impacted negatively because of lost data because many people still use software with local data copies on their PC/Mac.

But not if they use SaaS. In every case the saasu.com clients get up and running in minutes with much relief.

No loss of -

• Data (nor any data disclosure risk) – just find another computer with Internet access
• Time just when you need that time the most
• Revenue
• Client Satisfaction

It is unlikely any laptop with a local copy of your financial records will ever offer the same security and peace of mind as SaaS ‘big iron’ technology infrastructure.

Yet another reason why SaaS (Software as a Service) will prevail over Software for most businesses in the long run and why more and more are realising this benefit every single day.

I like to think of it as -

• be unique OR
• be integrated OR
• be in another market

To give a simplistic analogy, if your proposition is not truly unique in the world (like iPhone) then get integrated (like say SMS) so the convenience or the network effect makes you the winner.

Google has some unique offerings but their level of uniqueness will be challenged over time so spreading a wider net and ensuring a larger integrated offering is key to retention and growth. More specifically in SaaS finance we think it is inevitable that competition hots up in our space but we know (from experience) like a lot of seemingly straightforward activities, there is more to online accounting and SaaS finance than meets the eye and that just like Facebook vs LinkedIn or Plaxo or the free email wars, there is room for a bunch of different philosophies that service different market segments.

In Small business there are numerous levels already from jurisdiction neutral invoicing to country specific micro business solutions all the way through to super expensive multi-country corporate versions.

We are very much of the view that while people might want to start with just billing, it is not enough to deliver real business benefits and runs the risk of becoming yet another island of information if you are not very careful. Further, you need to differentiate or integrate to deliver real value – either do it uniquely well or link to someone that does. That is why we link with Salesforce.com instantly out of the box with no extra work and we and our partners are building more all the time.

Could we here at Saasu.com | the web finance engine be purchased by Google or Microsoft or Amazon or eBay to get into the web finance space in a quick merger/acquisition? Of course, while we are a decent size we are tiny by comparison on the global stage. Would it be good for our clients/partners? Probably very much so because of the integration with other services like mail, chat, analytics, e-commerce and the network effect of their client bases. Would there be some risks? Sure but they are little more than steps to follow and formula mitigation given the amount of resources that come into play in the M&A world.

You might find my comments on the above article of interest too, Marc Lehmann also has some interesting views.

This vendor loses a lot of revenue when SaaS Utilities are created allowing 1000′s of businesses to share infrastructure.

Data centres do go down every now and then, but it is very rare. Usually they are back up quick smart, so this is not a big prediction in my view, just scaremongering.

SaaS utilities know data centres can lose power and they manage for it. One little utility called Google is going as far as starting to fund development of it’s own power generation. Power reliability and reduced power usage are actually two very strong arguments to join the SaaS revolution.

The power burning question is…

Can you run your own self hosted servers at a higher level of power supply related up-time than a SaaS utility can?

SaaS utilities:

• can switch data centres within a Service Level Agreement stated time frame.
• have a uninterrupted power supplies.
• have capacity to send users to alternate nodes in different countries.
• have power surge filtering. That little power-surge protected power pack might not cover you in a direct lightening strike.
• have 24×7 monitoring so that problems begin being addressed immediately.
• consider the energy usage of their servers so as to optimise energy usage and cooling requirements.

Generally speaking hardware and software vendors are likely to suffer a negative revenue impact from businesses migrating to the SaaS world from the Software world. SaaS means thousands of businesses share networks instead of buying their own. It doesn’t take much common sense to realise the impact on software and hardware vendors.

What does the current SaaS revolution mean for these old economy vendors? Less sales, change their business model or fight the trend? We wait patiently to welcome them to the energy eco-friendly world of SaaS.

Industry terminology is like a verbal business card for all the players in the industry. Terms define who we are and how clients and prospects recognise us collectively. They are important because they are a key marketing channel.

For example – Do you recognise these terms and know what they mean?

• SaaS
• On-Demand
• CaaS
• S+S
• SasS
• Live
• PaaS
• UIaaS

Here at Saasu.com we are amazed at the word games other players in our industry are using to try and confuse the market.

SaaS means Software-as-a-Service. It is our preferred term and the one the industry uses mainly. Lets stick to it!

Particularly at a time when SaaS is still growing so we have a collective responsibility and need as providers to you our clients and prospects to educate you and (at least we believe) to not confuse the issues.

At Saasu.com want to make things clear not complicated.

In the SaaS industry we currently have some very large players happily confusing the market with terms they are making up, we think it is still very simple – we provide Software as a Service, the term On-Demand also is good. Both are plain English, makes senses, doesn’t confuse and has been in use for a long time. Here is what is happening out there in more detail -

• Salesforce.com – great CRM people and products which we like and integrate with, are using the term ‘on-demand’. They also say ‘no-software’ and on a good day also say good ol’ SaaS.
• Microsoft.com – the industry giant (we use some of their products just like most companies) are using the very new Microsoft only term Software + Service (S+S) pretty consistently now but are muddying the waters with this and ‘live’ services and have even seen the need to refer to SaaS and even another new one CaaS (Channel as a Service) and S+S and Live all on one page in an attempt to explain it all. At least they are trying I suppose.
• Netsuite.com – the SaaS accounting company – they started a year or so before us here at saasu.com – back in the 1990s – and they now use the term Software As Service (SasS) which seems unduly confusing and incorrect English at least to us. We hope that one day when we are as big as they are we won’t use our size to confuse the market.
• Salesforce.com (again but in a different category) – these guys don’t just do CRM, they are also providers of shared infrastructure to technology developers and they CRM clients who want to build more. Their CEO recently announced two new terms PaaS and UIaaS which mean Platform as a Service and UI as a Service respectively. They are alternatives to buying server and development software from people like Microsoft. They are fairly technical terms but also fairly logical extension of the core SaaS idea. We think thought that these new terms will confuse the main consumer and business market in the short term.

Here at Saasu.com we are a SaaS utility, we make sophisticated technology as easy to use as any other utility such as water, electricity and more. We wish you luck and will do our best to help you keep up with the terminology pollution.

Recapping -

• SaaS – Software as a Service : The preferred industry term that is established, widely used, self explanatory and widely encompassing the industry.
• On-Demand: Also an acceptable and established industry term.
• CaaS – oh dear a new variant we didn’t need from Microsoft
• S+S – Software and Service: ditto
• SasS – Software as Service: ditto
• Live – Microsoft one demand product family, mainly consumer – probably ditto, excusable as a product line name.
• PaaS – Platform as a Service A new one from Salesforce.com that is a bit techo
• UIaaS – User Interface as a Service: ditto

Two major global developments in the SaaS (Software as a Service) world show the blue sky is really here today.

1. Citibank goes Salesforce.com

The turning point has arrived for the move to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a global business trend with Citigroup dropping Microsoft, SAP and Oracle for 30,000 staff in order to switch to Salesforce.com as their CRM. Read more on Reuters.

The world’s largest bank is not alone. Citibank joins a handful of other major companies with over 20,000 staff using Salesforce.com including Japan Post which has 60,000 users on Salesforce.com according to the press release.

Salesforce.com claim to be the world’s largest on-demand (SaaS) customer relationship management system. By our estimates they are on track to beat US$800m revenue over the next year.

2. Someone big goes Google Docs

Just as interesting is a rumour just in from Menlo Park USA that Google is about to sign a single corporate account with 30,000 staff to switch from Microsoft Office to Google Docs and the corporate version of Gmail (which we think is cool).

If you haven’t seen Google Docs personal edition or the business version called Google Apps for my domain you should, they are excellent productivity tools and enablers for moving from old style software to full SaaS, just like Saasu.com is financial management. The easiest way to start with just a personal email account (you can work up to the other stuff) is called Gmail.

For those who did not see the earlier launch, Saasu.com already integrates instantly with Salesforce.com right now.

• Can you achieve better security than us?
• Is that laptop of yours (with accounting software on it) safer in your car, home or office than in our international data centre?
• Does your laptop have a guy with a gun standing in front of it to protect it?
• Do you back up your data as many times as day as we do?
• Do your store credit card numbers in your MYOB or Quicken file? What is your liability if you lose these?

We have done a lot to earn our customer’s trust. We must have considering we manage personal financial information for thousands of users.

Sometimes you need to trust others more than yourself, particularly in specialised fields.

This feels unnatural to some but it is logical and wise. You trust your bank with your money, you trust your email service provider with your email – all that critical and confidential correspondence.

You outsource these things and trust these specialist companies because they are better at it than you. These companies use the utility approach to security. They have built systems, processes and made infrastructure investments that exceed your individual capabilities. These companies have capacity and scale that brings high-end advantages to security that you can’t achieve easily as an individual. They can re-sell these services over and over with many customers which lowers the cost for you. So you get a high value, high security service for a low cost.

Software as a Service utilities like Saasu.com are exactly the same.

Last week was a good example – a crowd of SaaS trendies gathered to hear about a bunch of business solutions at the upmarket Establishment Hotel chaired by our good friends and premier partner – sqwarepeg and was billed as ‘like speed dating for business solutions’.

So how does it work? The format is simple.

Prospective clients register online and get to spend a few minutes with each vendor. Just like real speed dating the convener rings a bell at the end of the allotted time (3 minutes for singles meeting at traditional speed dating or in this case 10 minutes for prospects meeting vendors) and everyone moves on to the next ‘date’. In this case the date was held at a ‘pod’ complete with plasma and internet connectivity with demo SaaS application up and running.

If you are interested in continuing the ‘relationship’ you exchange cards or in true speed dating style write your details on the sheets provided.

Now repeat for each vendor until every prospect has seen every product once.

The great thing about this format is for clients they see a broad section of offerings quickly without risking getting stuck with a boring geek (just like speed dating). For vendors they get to meet a variety of clients and tailor the pitch just a little to stress the client specific needs just enough to follow up later.

Vendors showing at this session were Saasu.com showing our web finance engine (of course), Google showed Adwords, Omniture.com showed their rather cool web analytics (for higher end clients who outgrown Google Analytics), Eloqua, salesforce.com and Sqwarepeg also showed their own products.

The amount of cross-over between vendors was interesting, a good number were using each other’s products.

This event was called the ‘On Demand Circuit’ which is a face to face version of our own nascent Connectors hub – both of which are trying to build the local Developers SaaS Ecosystem.

Next time we aim to show the applications interacting and really demonstrate the power of the SaaS ecosystem in action. This will be great e.g. Saasu already talks to salesforce.com and so do other products.

Saasu received a kind mention in the latest Springboard Research press release.

It must be interesting because it was also picked up by a bunch of other media channels including -

• ITWire
• DestinationCRM.com
• The Open Press

The research claims 92.5% growth was experienced in 2006 to reach a market size of US$154 million and forecasts 83% growth in 2008 and growing to US$1.16 Billion in 2010 just for Asia.

Probably more interesting is the increase in awareness and adoption. These were up from 41% in 2006 to 75% in 2007 for awareness and actual adoption of some kind of SaaS service now use at 46% for the nearly four hundred firms surveyed.

This compares to IDC’s view of the on-demand world market (courtesy of NZTE) with 29.5% pa average growth 2007-20011 with estimated market size of US$3.95 Billion in 2006 (up 54% on 2005) and hitting US$14.5 Billion in 2011.

I have watched Springboard for some years and consider them to be one of the better experts in the area but who knows. One thing is certain – the future looks bright for SaaS and Saasu.com in particular.

Overall growth stats I hear bounced around in the industry are typically a minimum of 25%pa for the foreseeable future and 20-30% of the enterprise software market being addressable by SaaS. Personally I think both of these are on the low side.

I don’t envy the research people from IDC and Springboard who have to work this out.

One thing the industry and observers do tend to agree on is the reasons why people use SaaS – ease of use, ease of implementation and cost savings.

Personally I think these are ‘early stage’ responses and once people start really using the products they will add two more reasons – a) additional internet enabled features (e.g. simple emailing of things automatically like payslips, business intelligence and more) and b) richer other features that they actually use (as opposed to bloatware that has loads of un-used features – good SaaS vendors will watch their clients and learn – that is the key differentiator that will decide the eventual winners).