In my previous post I complained about the lack of interaction at some of the Software 2006 sessions. Well, the last two sessions I attended (actually running back and forth between the two) were definitely more participatory.
The panel discussion on Blogs and Web 2.0 in Marketing Communications was lively, and finally (!!!) they took a lot of customer questions. There we go, participation! 
Greg Gianforte’s presentation on “SaaS – successful go-to-market strategies” was more a traditional one, but there is something in his presence and style that made it very interesting. Of course it’s not just the presentation, but the success story behind it: while his company is not as super-hyped as Salesforce.com, RightNow is definitely a significant player, with Fortune 1000 customers and over $100M in revenue.
Some of Greg’s key points: One-size-fits-all is OK for the typical SMB customer, but large corporations will demand choice in a number of areas:
- Deployment choice: on-premise and hosted. They have to offer both, even tough 90% of business is now SaaS. Often the large corporate customer insists on on-premise, but their own IT gives them 12 month timeline, so they go live with the hosted version “temporarily” – then they get a taste of it and never move on-premise.
- Payment choice: a common misunderstanding is to equate On-demand to pay-as-you-go. Payment terms have nothing to do with deployment methods, so they offer monthly term, term net thirty, and perpetual licence+maintenance for both on-demand and on-premise. Interestingly enough, monthly payment (which comes at a premium) is often not chosen by small businesses, but large companies who want to “hide” the cost in the operating budget vs capital.
- Upgrade choice: Forced upgrades are unacceptable, they have an automated system that allows customers to pick their upgrade schedule in a multi-tenant environment.
- Integration choice: They’ve done hundreds of integrations, web services making it easier.
- Customization choice: meeting 80% of the requirements is not enough. High configurability, customization for the rest. Need architecture that supports customization even in the multi-tenant architecture.
Summing it up, these two sessions were informative, lively – but I need to stop now, the wine I smuggled out of the reception area is starting …. to … take …… ef….f….e…c….t.
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Tags: software2006, RightNow, SaaS, On-Demand, Enterprise Software, CRM, blogs, blogging
Zoli,
Thanks for the updates, keep them coming. How was breakfast? Hit the wiki up with an update.
Daily SaaS Links for 2006-04-05
[Daily Post from Cesura] Business Certainty: SaaS Customization is Great. But at What Price? "Ultimately, for the customer of SaaS and end-user applications it is the end-user experience that is important to satisfaction, renewal and retention.&qu…