May Edition

I’m back in California today, working from my home office. It takes some adjustment after being in our offices in Mexico for three months. The weather here is classic mid-spring – warm one day, cloudy and threatening rain the next. In Morelia, we were hitting the 90’s and waiting for our summer rains to come.

I see from the weather pane on my Google homepage, now that I’m nearing the end of my visit “home,” the cooling afternoon rains have indeed returned to Morelia. Next week, I’ll be carrying my umbrella and hoping I don’t get caught in a sudden downpour.

Change is hard work. No matter how carefully you plan, the proverbial Murphy seems to find a way to sneak in and create some havoc. It seems like I spend my days now divided between the two sides of problems – developing strategies and plans to enhance and optimize our services while dealing with unplanned contingencies and the ever-present inertia that clogs the change pipeline.

The positive side of this is our internal push into service optimization has given us better insight into some of the problems of our clients and opportunities to aid them in achieving their goals. It wasn’t planned, but stepping back and adopting a different point of view has been very illuminating. Just like my recent trip to San Francisco for the OpSource/SIIA SaaS Summit, getting out of your box and in front of a different set of ideas can spark a lot of creativity.

I hope you’re finding opportunities to get out and step away from your day-to-day reality this spring. And if you do – I hope we’ll get a chance to share some ideas and experience.

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Haut Tech: SaaS Insights from Scio Consulting

SaaS: All About the 2010 Summit

We were in San Francisco for the OpSource/SIIA SaaS Summit and to give a workshop with Jim Geisman of Software Pricing Partners following the conference. It was good to see a conference that was relatively well attended after a couple of years of shortfalls and cancellations. And it was good to see so many existing SaaS companies in the mix. I enjoy the challenge of startups, but seeing that there is a strong trend of maturity emerging in the industry is a good sign for everyone.

I really enjoyed the challenge of the workshop Jim and I gave. Our audience spanned a wide range – from large established providers to startups. We had a lot of material, but somehow, we got through it and managed to cover most of what our audience was interested in. It’s tough, because we bring a point of view to SaaS that isn’t covered in the media. SaaS is not about the technology, even though it takes technology to deliver it. It’s all about the business model.

The folks at DreamSimplicity covered the show and workshop. I hope to see much of the video they shot eventually, but in the meantime, you can find a brief video of us “at work” on their website.

This Week in SaaS #25

With the headline, “SaaS officially crosses the chasm – largest enterprise deployment…ever,” our friend Justin Pirie highlighted the deployment of 2.1 million seats to one customer by SuccessFactors in his widely read blog on SaaS news. It is truly an interesting development, but from our customer base, I have to wonder if this is actually the largest enterprise implementation of SaaS or perhaps in fact just the largest publically announced implementation. There are a lot of services that sit behind both other services and behind enterprise applications that are widely used but rarely mentioned.

I also strongly resist the temptation to measure success by numbers of seats, however impressive they might be. I don’t know the pressures that were applied or discounts that might have been given to achieve this feat, but given that it was announced in the press without client attribution, I clearly understand part of the motivation is to show market domination by SuccessFactors. Are they making as much profit on these seats as they do generally? Probably not. In fact, we’ve seen situations where a customer was so large it could literally “sink the ship” to take them onboard. Being able to absorb this many seats in a service business takes a lot of planning and modeling to assure it won’t cause more service and support disruption than you can handle. There are a lot of successful business-to-business SaaS operations that may never cross this particular chasm and measuring their success by the numbers of seats just isn’t a relevant measure. Cash flow, profit and client/user retention remain the key success indicators in SaaS.

Justin also highlighted Steve Blank’s “must see” Startup Lessons Learned Keynote. I have to admit some bias since I strongly advocate Steve and Eric Reis’s Lean Startup initiative, but it is certainly worth taking your time over lunch to listen to this 45-minute keynote.

There is a lot more out there, but I’m catching up this week after our trip and I’ve given you enough to digest for now. What’s been on your mind lately? What challenges are you facing? If you care to share, I’d love to hear from you.

All the best,