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.