online accounting
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. [Read more...]
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 [Read more...]
We reviewed our hosting provider again recently as part of a major upgrade in capacity to handle our growth.
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 -
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 -
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.
There is a great article on this topic that deserves some profile as it neatly sums up the debate around where giants like Google go next.
I like to think of it as -
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.
A major hardware and software vendor is warning of a data centre power disaster sometime in the future. I feel that there is an ulterior motive.
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.
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?
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. [Read more...]
Two major global developments in the SaaS (Software as a Service) world show the blue sky is really here today.
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.
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.
I spoke at the NSW.net ICT cluster last week to a bunch of potential and current Microsoft Partners (we work on all operating systems for your information). I gave our 5 minute pitch and as usual during Q&A there were lots of questions (SaaS is a hot topic at the moment). We always get a security question and my answer is always the same, it’s a bunch of questions that effectively return the challenge. I only asked a couple of these but I’ve listed some others I often ask as well. [Read more...]
Everyone has heard of speed dating – but the new new thing is using it for business. I experienced it in Sydney but it seems to be a global phenomenon…. and a great idea.
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.
It has been an interesting couple of months with recent research released by leading analysts – all putting their stakes in the ground for current and future growth in the software as a service segment globally.
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 -
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).
