A couple of posts in the last day or two got me thinking of some added value for SaaS. Over at the unreasonablemen they discuss the differences between ASPs of old and SaaS of today - the premise being that SaaS is differentiated and add more value than ASPs did.
Bob at Smoothspan started talking about vertical benchmarking for SaaS customers and this led me to a whole new value proposition for SaaS that I hadn’t given much thought to (and a question or two that raises).
If I look at my own businesses, I can think of a few times in the past where some benchmarking would have been really valuable - metrics like marketing spend as a percentage of revenue, remuneration rates, travel costings, minute production rates etc etc. This information is vaguely available but from diverse sources, generally out of date and not overly specific (not to mention at a significant cost given the hassle involved in mining that data.
SaaS obviates all of these issues - if I’m using Xero, at the back end Xero can do some simple querying to mine some comparative data that gives me some averages I’m interested in (although Xero is probably a bad example given the sensitivity around financial metrics). Similarly Salesforce can allow me to compare pipeline timings with others in the same or different industries.
Like all of these things however there is a but, and that big but is privacy - where does the line get drawn between general, non-specific data and something sensitive - as we’ve seen of late around the Beacon debacle - privacy is a big issue for consumer users, it’s significantly bigger for business users.
It is however a worthwhile value-add and one that SaaS is uniquely placed to deliver upon.
At the enterprise 2.0 conference in Sydeney (and no I’m not there but watching from a distance), Rosie Mullaly from Telstra in Australia gave a presentation on how her organisation utilisises social networking.
Telstra has an initiative, nowwearetalking.com.au, that aims to open a channel for communication between its customers, its competitor’s customers and general consumers of telecommunications products and services. It would appear that they’re genuine about publishing all comments, with Rosie even inviting the audience to submit critical comments to the site and check that they are posted.
It’s a brave move and something that it would be nice to see other enterprises in Australasia replicate - I guess it’s about showing the value as being greater than and potential threat caused by criticism.
I love this. Actually I don’t - I had an elevator pitch all ready that leveraged off 2.0 enabled friendship bracelets with some trick AJAX stuff…. now I’ll have to go back to the drawing board…
Enjoy (and hat tip to the purveyor of all things comic, Jim Donovan…)
Troy Wing is a fellow Kiwi who seems to be going great guns in the stateside IT industry - it’s nice to have such role models to aspire to.
In an excellent post today, Troy made some comparisons about a worker of yesterday/today and a Web2.0 empowered worker. What he says resonates completely for me, which is kind of ironic considering I just got off a flight from Auckland where I spent the day doing some consulting work which, in a 2.0 world, could have been done remotely. That said 2.0 is a journey that we’ve only just begun.
Some of the things Troy says are skewed towards the good side of the 2.0 spectrum and the bad end of the traditional spectrum - but I guess that’s just a little artistic licence!
Time
Web 2.0 empowered Technology Worker
Traditional “On Premise” Technology Worker
8am to 9am
Skype with US East Coast team members, 10 minute meeting to discuss plan for the day and any urgent issues. Review any issues found by India Team. 1 Developer in NY is sick, but can continue working. Review Task/Issues List in SaaS Tracking Tool.
Sitting on Route 80E waiting for vehicle breakdown to clear.
9:30am to 12pm
Check out code from online Subversion and continue development, continuous IMing with other developers and project managers to assist in problem resolution. Add useful tips and hints to company wiki.
Check emails, has a question to ask India team but can’t as they have gone home.Has to wait until tomorrow. Move onto next task. Status Meetings with entire US team. Delayed by 1 hour as Project Manager is stuck in traffic still. 1 team member calls in sick.
Half an hour after meeting starts, CTO walks in and wants a recap meeting, meeting starts again.
1pm to 5pm
Continue Development, stuck on a problem, ask social network for help. Problem resolved. Have an idea of a blog post, draft it out and post it. Decide you need to do some online shopping for the holidays. Complete development tasks for the day and decide to start on tomorrow’s tasks
to stay ahead. Think of a great UI idea, you prototype it and publish it on Dev Web Server for all to review.
Server problem at work, development delayed by half an hour as cannot get source code from server. You begin development, stuck on a problem, send an email out to colleague. Out of office reply received back. You skip the problem and decide to surf for a little while.
6pm -7pm
Dinner
Stuck in Traffic
8pm
IM or skype with India to handover tasks for overnight processing
India reads email, can’t understand the requirements, sends an email in response. No Progress for another day.
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