Archive for August, 2007

SaaS/s and SaaS/v post…

Published by Ben Kepes on August 31, 2007 in Business, Design, IT, New Zealand, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 1 Comment

Over here at SaaS blogs, Sinclair has posted about what he refers to as SaaS with ROF (Regular Old Functionality) as opposed to SaaS with ROF + Value.

This is a very similar theme to my previous post about the two SaaS models - SaaS/s and SaaS/v. However while Sinclair is coming to the discussion from a perspective of driving down sales and marketing costs for SaaS vendors, my perspective was very much one of building viable, sustainable and scalable SaaS ventures.

To me this is not a discussion of semantics, it a vital component of building a SaaS business that startups need to think about. My contention is that if a new startup where to attempt to embark on a SaaS/s model, they would be doomed to mediocrity at best and failure at worst. The space has matured sufficiently (and bear in mind that SaaS is still a new concept but much more mature than it was a few years back) that new entrants are arriving rapidly with overlapping business concepts - they need a differentiator - that differentiator should be a SaaS/v play.

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Nokia and public relations….

Published by Ben Kepes on August 30, 2007 in Business, Design, Efficiency, Manufacturing and Strategy. 2 Comments

This is a post that I hope will find its way into Nokia NZ or Nokia international’s public relations department.

A month or so ago I acquired a new Nokia 6630 phone. Pretty much straight away it was obvious that the phone was buggy and needed repairs. I took it back to Noel Leemings where it was purchased who sent it to Nokia’s NZ service agent and the phone came back “uneconomic to repair” with the offer of a refund. Now for a couple of reasons I didn’t want a refund;

  • The phone was closing out cheap and a new phone with the same features was significantly more expensive
  • I bought a phone assuming it was fully functioning - I didn’t want my money back I just wanted execution of the deal I thought I was getting

After much coercion the manager at Noel Leemings agreed to contact Nokia directly on my behalf, after much to-ing and fro-ing they decided to replace the phone for a new one.

Immediately after picking the new phone up it was obvious that it was also buggy - the screen on the replacement also freezes and the phone itself turns off at random times.

Tomorrow I intend to visit, once again, Noel Leemings and ask that they revert back to Nokia.

Now there a few issues here;

  • Am I just unlucky or is the Nokia 6630 generally a problem item?
  • Will Nokia bend over to find a good resolution to this issue?

Even if I’m just unlucky and have had two connesecutive dodgy phones Nokia should cut their losses and ensure that this time I exit the discourse feeling satisfied. I’m an extensive blogger and a freelance journalist. I would have thought that an organisation such as Nokia would be keen to protect it’s reputation with people such as myself.
I’ll be attempting to forward this post on to Nokia and I would think a positive outcome (and you can bet that I’ll be posting about my experience) would be;

  • Either they exhaustively test a brand new phone to ensure it works (and this is less than desirable given my experiences thus far) or
  • They limit their losses and give me a phone that has, at least, the same features as my one but is a proven, reliable unit

I will keep you all posted…..

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Crossing the chasm with SaaS…

Published by Ben Kepes on August 30, 2007 in Business, Design, Governance, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 2 Comments

Smoothspan has this excellent post talking about SaaS as the enabler to cross the chasm between early adopters and everyone else.

Excellent points are made in the post but more emphasis needs to be placed on the one imperative issue - SERVICE.

Through user-centric design and taking a non-geek look at the core problem the user wants solved, SaaS is ideally placed to help cross the chasm. but this is where it gets tricky - most SaaS businesses are run by geeks. Geeks are, by nature, bad at taking an “eye of the (luddite) customer” view.

And that’s where we come back to governance - I contend that for SaaS enterprises even more than for traditional ISV’s a non-technical perspective is imperative. his perspective needs to be at the highest levels and that’s when indepedent directors prove their mettle. My presentation at BarCampChristchurch is all about SaaS and I’ll try and address the governance issues as well.

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Telecom - coming at ya…

Published by Ben Kepes on August 30, 2007 in Business. 2 Comments

With a hat tip to David MacGregor I thought Id post this image he has over on his site - I think it’s classic (and oh so true);

disservicesatisfiedthumbnail.jpg

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A good Office x.0 offering….

Published by Ben Kepes on August 30, 2007 in Business, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 0 Comments

I use MS office, Open Office (under duress) and Google Apps. That’s simply not enough office app choice for a budding geek so I’m now using Zoho as well.

Initial observations - nice, really nice. Much better functionality in both writing and spreadsheeting than Google apps, great importing (although it would be good if it worked on MS Office 07 files - bet this will come soon) and pretty fast to boot.

Some PIM functionality needs to be rolled out fast (it is already in prvate beta), and ideally with good cross functionality between google Cals and it.

All and all Zoho have done a sterling job of creating a SaaS/s product - there is a little bit of added value in that;

  • Unlike MS or Open it is web enabled
  • Unlike Google Apps it has pretty full functionality - almost akin to a standard package

They’re getting close to SaaS/v and the modicum of added value is great but they need something a little more, some little hook to create a compelling message that encourages user to use their product.

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Google are evil….. but not THAT evil…

Published by Ben Kepes on August 30, 2007 in Business, Design, IT, Uncategorized and Web x.0. 3 Comments

Some super-sleuthing resulted in this post which identified that the Google Aps terms of service says;

“… you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services…”

Now the conspricists among us would say that Google, in its plans for galactic domination, is intending to take all our private data and crate some leverage from it, steal our business ideas and generally subvert our IP.

However we need to look at it dispassionately. Google is in the business of selling advertising - every sevrice it provides is in the pursuit of that aim (directly or not). I see it more as over zealous lawyers trying to fit a few more words in legal agreements, perhaps they’re paid by the clause, rather than anything dodgy.

It does have to be said however that this is sometimes what happens when an enterprise gets so big that it forgets about its vision, its customers and simplicity.

Compare if you will the Zoho terms of service;

“We assure you that the contents of your Account will not be disclosed to anyone and will not be accessible to employees of AdventNet. Neither do we process the contents of your Account for serving targeted advertisements”

Perhaps the Google gang needs to re-read “How to win friends and influence people”

Hat tip to Zoli for pointing this discussion out!

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Words from the lovefest - MoneyWorks vs MYOB vs Xero

Published by Ben Kepes on August 29, 2007 in Business, Design, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 2 Comments

So….. reporting from the Small Business Expo - I’ve been undercover today - doing the rounds of the accounting software businesses talking them about what they do and pretending to know nothing.

Both MoneyWorks and MYOB are on the defensive, running down Xero’s strategy, product offering and viability. The man from Xero was the least combative of the three - Xero would no doubt say that both the ISV’s feel threatened and this is where their hostility comes from.

I talked to the guy from MYOB about my previously posted about problems with their product. In relation to the agonisingly slow processing across the network, MYOB had two comments to make;

  • It works well under terminal server
  • It probably needs to move to an SQL platform

Now on a technology-centric level, and as a bit of a geek myself, I can see that and buy into the story. However we need to turn it around (and if nothing else SaaS by its very nature forces us to do this) and look at it from a user-centric perspective.

I run six or so businesses through MYOB, all I want is an accounting package that does what I need it to, reasonable rapidly and without lots of technical wizardy - IT JUST NEEDS TO WORK! From a user-centric perspective then, MYOB is failing dismally at doing what it needs to.

Both MoneyWorks and MYOB made some valid comments questioning how Xero will work once it has to serve up long lists of customers, or inventory items or whatever. Of course the technology-centric perspective we could get all excited about would include increased latency, upscaling broadband speeds and improved bandwidth functionality. None of that matters, what everyone needs to do is some “mind of the customer” analysis to determine what exactly it is that the customer needs.

If Xero has an issue dishing up long lists of data then behnd the scenes it needs to resolve that - from a user-centric perspective it doesn’t matter how they do that - it just needs to work.

The encumbants dont work particularly well so in my judgement all three enterprises are at a similar level right now - the interesting thing wil be which of them moves the quickest to sort out their individual issues.

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More on existing ISV’s morphing to SaaS

Published by Ben Kepes on August 29, 2007 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, New business, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 3 Comments

I’ve written in the past of the viability or otherwise of Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) changing their business model to embrace SaaS delivery.

We see a lot of it around, Microsoft embracing SaaS (albeit by a different name), SAP going down the SaaS route etc. I’ve always been pretty sceptical - not being able to imagine how an existing ISV can morph it’s operations into SaaS with its higher risk levels, different revenue streams etc etc.

Over at SaaS blogs Sinclair has written an excellent post about different strategies that ISV’s can take to build SaaS competencies and business cases. Part of the post was the following chart detailing possible business implementation strategies;

strategychart15thumbnail.gif

It’s a great post but I was left feeling unsure as to the viability of any of the strategies. they all have significant risks and threats, and they all to a greater or lesser extent rely on the shareholders being prepared to walk away from an existing revenue stream and venture into unknown territory.

I came away from the post still firm in the belief that the obstacles to an existing publicly owned ISV’s morphing itself to SaaS are just too great. Perhaps a closely held ISV without shareholder pressure for ongoing dividends could do it, perhaps the “new product line” or “software lite” approaches identified in the chart could work as an introduction to the change process but it still seems unlikely for me.

My money is still firmly placed with the lean and mean new entrants. But the only way for them to build scale and traction sufficiently rapidly to get soom momentum is to sort their funding out well. And that brings us back to Xero - despite the bad press of late about falling post-IPO shareprices, I firmly believe that their “list to fund development” strategy is right on the money….

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Xtra putting its money where its mouth is…

Published by Ben Kepes on August 29, 2007 in Business, Efficiency, IT and New Zealand. 0 Comments

$7million - that’s how much Xtra will spend in an effort to appease the customers left high and dry in the recent burst bubble fiasco.

Nice of them to try but I can’t help but think that it might be a little too late - this incident might be the catalyst that makes people consider their choice of ISP. Still given all that Xtra are between a rock and a hard place and it’s good to see them at least try and appease people.

But why oh why did they not see this coming - methinks thee are some very highly paid consultants giving some very bad advice inside Telecom.

Tip - Listen to the people - thats what Web x.o enables!

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Web 2.0 a discussion….

Published by Ben Kepes on August 29, 2007 in IT and Web x.0. 3 Comments

As posted previously - I prefer to talk about Web x.0 rather than web 2.0. In my opinion giving the title 2.0 to anything only increases discussion about timescales to 3.0, 4.0 etc etc.

Seth from Interclue gave a talk last night (I wasn’t there but he blogged about it - of course!). He also showed off his personal mind map/eco system diagram for Web 2.0 and how it interfaces with him personally.

Seth rightly talks about the experience of trying to talk x.0 to people who haven’t heard of Tim O’Reilly - nice to hear someone inside the industry identify and talk to the technical/contextual chasm (ask me about it and I’ll post sometime!)

Of course Seth plugs his own product a little bit - but then again that’s because he believes it is a useful and important x.0 tool.

Anyway - Check out Seth’s post here.

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