SaaS

I was reading on Harvard Business Review's website and in rapid succession I came across Ron Ashkenas' blog post titled "How Simple (and Human) Is Your Customer Service?" and Anthony Tjan's blog post titled "The Best Business Model in the World". I was overjoyed to see these two subjects together because inContact offers a software as a service technology (see Tjan's blog) that helps with what Ashkenas was writing about. 

It would be easy for me to go on and on about the values of a SaaS distribution model for contact centers and likely sometime soon I will, but Ashkenas' blog struck a stronger cord with me.  There is nothing that I find more refreshing than reading about someone like Ashkenas' view on customer service.  He highlights in his blog the different preferences that people have when it comes to customer service and that got me to thinking.   Read more»

I read a great article recently about a business owner who opted to lease printers rather than buy them outright. She really stressed over the decision, but in the end, found that leasing was by far the better option for her and her business. She didn't have any up-front cash outlay and she was able to try multiple printers before she found the one right for her business.

I couldn't help but think about how similar this business owner's purchasing decision was to deciding between SaaS and premise-based software.    Read more»

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore discusses how new technology is adopted. It explains that the first group to use a new technology is the ‘Early Adopters’. These are the people that love to try new things. They are comfortable with risk. They are the ones that ‘break it in’ and are invaluable in the process of working out the kinks. But they are also on the fringe. They typically represent a tiny percentage of a market.

The bulk of the users are not so disposed to taking risk. They want to see and use a product that has very few kinks, with established SLA’s or levels of performance. Reliability is their mantra. They won’t use a product until they can trust it with their most valuable asset, their customers. At inContact we recognize how important that trust is. But trust does not come just because someone says ‘Trust me’. Trust comes from seeing, hearing and experiencing.   Read more»

inContact is pleased to see their product offering playing a hand in the support provided to the 2010 Haiti Earthquake Relief effort.  As impromptu as the earthquake was, inContact’s customer, InService America (ISA), was quickly presented with the urgent need to allocate 65 additional agents to staff lines dedicated to raise money for the Earthquake victims. This unplanned business need would have made Taylor Halsey, ISA’s Network Administrator / Telephony Manager sweat if he didn’t have inContact.   In a matter of minutes, Taylor simply added additional inContact users over the internet, marking his first step in an ad hoc disaster recovery methodology that a premise-based solution could not offer.  inContact offers ISA the ability to staff lines remotely and onsite, the ability to add additional agents as needed, the ability to increase or decrease ports as needed, and without the need of expensive premise-based equipment.      Read more»

SAP is a skeptic. "SaaS offerings don't measure up in weaving together complex business processes that have to be managed and analyzed in real time, and SaaS vendors will have a tough time living up to customer's expectations. You're now seeing software as a service pure plays being driven into complex conversations that they're lousy at." They claim that now more than ever companies need a full-featured, integrated applications platform for running global business operations. They would...they are SAP.

There is no doubt about it, SaaS is being invited into more complex conversations...but we are succeeding and winning.  SAP has good reason to be worried. 

Deploying a SaaS application is new for many companies and there are lots of people willing to offer advice on how to evaluate and select the right SaaS solution.  Alistair Croll offered a good set of questions to ask when evaluating SaaS. I like his advice because it offers a good holistic view of SaaS and makes the point that a long term vision of the SaaS option is critical to making a good decision.

Alistair recommends asking the following questions,   Read more»

Gartner VP Robert P. Desisto has recently publish research entitled, "Fact Checking: The Five Most-Common SaaS Assumptions" to help people understand more about Software as a Service and debunk potential myths.  Of course, I couldn't let this one go without commenting on it.  So here it goes:   Read more»