Software as a Service - Part I

Filed in archive Technology on March 22, 2005

We are here 'Software as a Service' event in Santa Clara, CA and enjoy the first sessions here.

Practical Considerations

On the panel:

- Tim Chou, Oracle on Demand- Halsey Minor, CEO, Grand Central- Zach Nelson, CEO, Netsuite- Steve Singh, CEO, ConcurHighlights:

- Panelists discuss the need and evolvement of Software as a Service (SaaS) model
- The question is often cited is SaaS just another hype like 'b2b'. 'b2c','Push Model'. Panelists agree that SaaS must be more deliver a better product.
- Interesting notion - pricing and delivery should be separated in the analysis of SaaS.
- Frequency of deals has gone up for most sales reps in the industry before SaaS (4) with SaaS (15).
- Customers have more control in SaaS - customers can cancel a contract every day (at least ideally) while in an up-front model an investment is lost.
- SaaS supports specialization - best of breed software is accessible for them
- Steve confirms that revenues per customer on an ASP model are higher than in upfront license only customers (might be true for a startup but certainly not for the bigger vendors) - he even says SMBs are more profitable than MNCs.
- Halsey makes sure that one of the values in SaaS is the interopability between different applications via web services.

Conclusion: Quite a nice warm-up for this day - one of the problems of the industry as it is hardly a well defined industry as it serves to very different customers with very different problem solutions. But sure SaaS is better than buying software in most circumstances.