SMB / SME Archives - Zoli's Blog

Zoho Rounds Out Small Business Suite with Accounting App–Zoho Books

Posted on January 19, 2011 ·

This morning Zoho, known for SMB focused SaaS offerings in the areas of productivity, collaboration, business processes launched an Accounting app: Zoho Books. I typically don’t do detailed product reviews, when I see the first good ones, will link to them – just a few points here and then let’s discuss how it rounds out Zoho’s overall strategy.

The following video introduction is a bit “cutesy”:

-and that’s quite intentional. In fact simplicity is one of the key points in Zoho Books:

Clear, streamlined UI, tabs, easy terminology –i.e. Money In, Money Out. This service is clearly targeted at non-accountants, which is most of us in a small business – hey, even I can understand most of it.
That said, Books offers the opportunity to share data and collaborate with accountants (Ouch, did I really needed that reminder for tax time?;-) )
Multi-currency support – this is typically a later add-on in many systems, but Zoho has a wide international presence with most of their other services
Integration with Zoho CRM, Invoice, Mail – somewhat basic now, will be improved as we’ve seen with the rest of Zoho’s offerings
Support for electronic payment systems like Paypal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net. This is a “hidden treasure” inherited from twin service Zoho Invoice, which is a subset of Book’s functionality and can be easily upgraded. Why hidden? Because relatively few know that Paypal offers 50 cent (yes, that’s $0.50 per transaction) Business Payments NOT available through the Web, only via their API, i.e. apps like Zoho Invoice and Boooks.

Having said that, is Zoho Books a Quickbooks killer?

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve » Zoli Erdos)

Filed Under: SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: accounting, business suite, CloudAve, crm, erp, Integration, intuit, quickbooks, small Business, smb, sme, xero, zoho, zoho invoice

NetSuite vs SAP … Round #n. A Game Changer?

Posted on May 18, 2010 ·

In my recent Suites post I said there were exactly 1.5 (one and a half) integrated full business solutions (SaaS Suite, SaaS All-In-One, SaaS ERP, SaaS SMB ERP – take your pick or create a new one) offered as a service. The one in that equation was NetSuite, and the half is SAP’s Business ByDesign.

The half is getting close to becoming full, bringing the total number of solutions to two. SAP’s ByD, originally launched in 2007 was a functionally rich solution already at launch – in fact I called it the most complete SaaS Suite not available customers. And therein lies the rub. Functionally rich, but a phantom product that only a few selected early customers could get their hands on. And it wasn’t simply a marketing / segmentation blunder as some analyst thought, it was all about architecture: SAP missed out on the economics of multi-tenancy, and realized they could not profitably operate and scale what they referred to as “mega-tenancy” – so they went back re-architecting ByDesign.

The lost 2 1/2 years were a gift to competitor NetSuite, and they milked it every possible way. SAP announced entry to the SaaS SMB space validated their market, and their own delay was an open invitation to NetSuite. As CEO Zach Nelson said at their recent earnings conference:

I’d like to thank SAP for being our IBM.

NetSuite never shied away from aggressive marketing (I guess that’s the Oracle blood in their veins), starting from pranks like the SAP for the Rest of Us Party during SAPPHIRE 2006 to staging a shootout at the anti-SAP Conference or releasing edgy videos a’la Mac vs Windows. But the biggest coup, one with definite gains was the Business ByNetsuite program which we covered here:

The aptly named Business ByNetsuite program guarantees at least 50% savings to current SAP R/3 customers relative to – watch this! – the annual maintenance fees they are now paying to SAP. Yes, it’s not a price-to-price comparison. With the perpetual licence model customers pay upfront, but are still forced to pay annual maintenance fees – with SaaS there is only a subscription fee, and now NetSuite proves it can be half of only the maintenance component of traditional software’s TCO.

Yes, NetSuite took deals from SAP and of course amidst all the chest-thumping they did not particularly emphasize the fact that that these were often divisional deals: smaller divisions of large companies, often replacing legacy systems as a result of an acquisition with the parent company running SAP. NetSuite even developed NetSuite-to-SAP connectors for enterprise reporting, fully recognizing they won’t be replacing SAP on the corporate level.

Now of course these were relatively easy wins when NetSuite was the only game in town – and that’s about to change, as SAP is getting ready for General Availability of a new Business ByDesign in July. And SAP CEO Bill McDermott fired a few salvos over to NetSuite in his announcement, as quoted by Reuters:

McDermott said he believes Business by Design’s sales will be able to quickly surpass those of NetSuite, which last year posted $167 million in revenue.

“When Business by Design is coming at them like a 99-mile-an-hour fastball, let’s see how tough they are,” McDermott said of NetSuite.

Winning against SAP when they had no relevant SaaS offering was one thing, going up against a functionally strong product will be another. NetSuite is changing tone, comparing the two offerings, as show by this slide I received from NetSuite:

This must be the first time SAP finds themselves on the wrong side of the David vs. Goliath equation (or is it the elephant vs flea? – but who is the elephant and who is the flea in the long run?). I have an issue specifically re. the functional shootout, which was rigged at best.

As for the rest of the comparisons, a fair summary is that neither side is a newcomer. SAP is the granddaddy of business processes with 30 years of experience, but they are new to operating / scaling a cloud environment – something NetSuite has a head start on them.

I have reasons to believe (more on that in another post) ByD will not be a failure this time around, and NetSuite will have to adopt to competing with a real product vs. a phantom. It will be a healthy change, with customers now having a choice of (at least) two well integrated SaaS offerings. In the end, customers win.

(Keep an eye open for the next post on ByD and beyond…)

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: all-in-one, application suites, business bydesign, byd, CloudAve, Enterprise Software, erp, integrated suites, marketing, netsuite, On-Demand, SaaS, sap, saphirenow, software as a service

Google Launches Apps Marketplace

Posted on March 9, 2010 ·

I’m at the Google Campfire One event where they’ve just announced the Google Apps Marketplace. The site is live now, feel free to browse. The speculation is now over, this is Google’s answer on whether they will enter the Business Applications market – they just did, with an entire ecosystem of Partners.

The new Marketplace fills an obvious need: Google Apps has 25 million users at over 2 million businesses who clearly need more than just the communication / collaboration / Office type applications Google can offer today. Here’s a chart of some of the initial Marketplace participants:

As you can see, the list represents a wide range of partners – some are very obvious fit, others bring questions re. future business model. Just picking a few randomly, I can easily see how electronic signature management vendor Echosign, the obviously named eFax or meeting scheduler Timebridge expands Google Apps functionality, and they are all easy to use applications. Spanning Backup is a brand new product just launched days ago, but they’ve established credibility with the previous product, Spanning Sync.

At the other end of the scale we have fairly complex offerings represented by NetSuite and Successfactors. For SMB SaaS ERP and HRM (yup, lots of acronyms) offerings integrating Web based office apps or email is a natural fit, but these companies have a very different sales and implementation model: far from the simple test-buy-click-to-install model they have a longer, more traditional sales cycle, a few weeks of implementation work, training..etc. It will be interesting to see how their presence at the Marketplace plays out, and which side generates more deals for the otherl.

Then there’s Zoho (dislosure: Zoho is sponsoring CloudAve, my main blogging gig). On one hand, clearly competing with Google, on the other hand, partnering where reasonable. My personal opinion has been for a while that Google should have acquired Zoho long ago, offering a killer combo of Gmail+ GCal and the Zoho Business Apps to the SMB space. Obviously neither Google nor Zoho thought it was their best interest (and not mine, either, why would I want to lose our Sponsor…), but they finally met at the Marketplace:-) Kudos to Google for playing fair with co-opetitors in the interest of their Customers, unlike that other company that booted Zoho from their Appexchange when they did not agree to kill Zoho CRM… CRM is now Zoho’s best selling product, and Google Apps users will now have easy access to it, as well as to Zoho Projects. Zoho Meeting will soon be integrated, too.

Talk about integration, Google published extensive API’s for integration of 3rd party programs to Apps, the Marketplace allows easy discovery of such apps and there’s also a commercial model, eventually offering billing on the software vendors’ behalf, for a 20% cut. For now the actual purchase transaction takes place outside Google, but once it’s completed, Administrators of a Google Apps domain can simply enable the new apps which will be accessible via Google’s Universal Navigation.

Other then for the obvious reasons – users / customers having more choice, I am happy about this launch because I think if any company, Google has the clout to actually expand the market, and in a way influence user behavior, moving us all, consumers and business alike from the traditional sales-heavy model to a pull-model, where we try-click-to buy. I wrote about this ‘shift’ in detail in the previous post .

Stay tuned for more analysis from Ben who will look at the details as well as competing Apps Markets, and from Krish who will look at some individual offerings.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )

Filed Under: SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: CloudAve, Google, Google App Marketplace, Google Campfire One, netsuite, zoho

Salesforce.com: Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

Posted on September 4, 2009 ·

Is Salesforce.com’s glass for SMBs half full (of lemonade) or half empty? I borrowed the lemonade metaphor from Venturebeat’s post announcing Salesforce.com’s new Contact Manager offering for (very) small businesses.

On second thought we should use orange juice as a metaphor – as in disappearing orange juice, by Tropicana which offers less juice in a redesigned pitcher for the same price, and even tries to sell it as a benefit to consumers

Salesforce.com “pulled a Tropicana” with the announcement of their $9 Contact Management edition, and the funny thing is, nobody seems to have noticed it. No, the media duly buys what Salesforce.com PR sells, welcoming the new edition as “giving something back to the little guy” , “breaking through a price barrier”, “making it affordable for SMBs to get in the Cloud”.

Nobody bothered to do some fact-checking, which would have unveiled that in the new Edition is in fact offering less for the same price, a’la Tropicana. Salesforce.com has pulled off a price increase and it went largely unnoticed.

Prior to this announcement the lowest-priced edition of Salesforce CRM, the Group Edition was priced at $9 per user per month, and it is now increased to $35. The few media outlets that noticed this refer to it as temporary promotion for August, that has now expired. Let’s see just how temporary it was: the “promo” started not in August but in June, and not in 2009, but 2008.

This promotion was supposed to expire in July of last year, but it did not – and I correctly predicted it would transition into a permanent price-cut, without much fanfare. Indeed the $9 pricing lasted over a year. And just for the record, prior to dropping the price to $9, CRM Group Edition had cost $20 – so the $35 new price is definitely not just ending a promotion, it’s a price hike of several notches.

But forget history, let’s look at value: having a Contact Manager functionality is certainly useful, although I suspect Google Apps (which is integrated with this Salesforce.com offering) will also offer enhanced Contacts functions. Still, nice – for 2 users only, as that’s the maximum number allowed for this edition. Talk about 2-person companies, let’s remember that Salesforce.com used to offer a free single-user Personal Edition CRM. I’ve just checked my dormant account, it’s still working – but the offering is no longer available for new users.

So let’s see: from free CRM for one user, later $9 CRM up to five users, we’ve gone to $9 Contact Manager for two users. Quite an improvement.

Now if you have 3 users, the lowest entry point to Salesforce.com is now Group Edition at $35 per person = $105 vs. the previous price of $27. And if you have 6 users, you no longer qualify for Group Edition, your entry point now is Professional Edition at $65 per user.

Oh, well. Math lesson over, it’s a nice sunny morning, time for my glass of OJ ( not half full, not half empty – just full.)

(Disclosure: I’m Editor of CloudAve, a group blog sponsored by Zoho. This article is cross-posted there.)

Filed Under: Marketing / PR, SMB / SME · Tagged: CloudAve, contact management, crm, crm price hike, pr, salesforce.com, software pricing, transparency

Business ByNetSuite Goes After SAP, While The Giant is Sleeping – Where is Business ByDesign?

Posted on November 7, 2008 ·

Ben recently reported on how NetSuite is going after Salesforce.com, by announcing their Renewforce program. Today NetSuite is going after bigger fish: the leader in Enterprise Software, SAP.

The aptly named Business ByNetsuite program guarantees at least 50% savings to current SAP R/3 customers relative to – watch this! – the annual maintenance fees they are now paying to SAP. Yes, it’s not a price-to-price comparison. With the perpetual licence model customers pay upfront, but are still forced to pay annual maintenance fees – with SaaS there is only a subscription fee, and now NetSuite proves it can be half of only the maintenance component of traditional software’s TCO.

Read on to find out how SAP’s own blunder around their excellent product, Business ByDesign opened the opportunity for Netsuite…

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: A1S, bbd, business bydesign, byd, Enterprise Software, marketing, netsuite, SaaS, sap, sap byd, small business software, smb, sme, software maintenance

Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition @ SMB Price

Posted on April 16, 2008 ·

This morning Zoho announced the Enterprise Edition of their CRM product. The key updates are:

Introduction of Role-based Security Administration

Profiles for managing CRM module-level permissions
Roles for modeling organizational hierarchy and setting up data sharing rules
Groups for sharing the data among various departments
Field-level security for controlling the access rights (View or Edit) of fields in CRM modules

Enhancements in product Customization & Data Administration

Multi-language Support (11 Languages)

SSL Support for Professional & Enterprise Version

Integration with Zoho Sheet

Improved Business Functionality

Automatically update Stock information once the Purchase Order is approved
Find and Merge the duplicate records in Vendors module
Convert Quote to Sales Order or Invoice in a single click
Convert Sales Order to Invoice in a single click
Add account information automatically while creating quotes/orders/invoices from the potentials

Wiki-based Context-sensitive Help

The key in “going enterprise” is no doubt the new security/permissioning scheme. That said, Zoho CRM has already been functionally rich even before today’s upgrade. I’ve repeatedly stated that supporting business processes like Sales Order Management, Procurement, Inventory Management, Invoicing Zoho really has a mini-ERP system, under the disguise of the CRM label.. In fact let’s just stop here for a minute.

Today’s announcement aside, I still consider Zoho’s primary focus to be the small business (SMB) market. As for CRM, it really comes down to the classic breadth vs. depth of functionality question. Zoho CRM’s breadth, along with the other productivity applications allows many SMB’s to use it as their single, only business application. The market leader in SaaS CRM, Salesforce.com clearly supports fewer business processes, offering more depth in each – probably a better fit for larger enterprises which likely run several applications anyway. This matrix provides an overview of Zoho CRM vs. Salesforce CRM Group and Professional Editions. (click on pic for detail)

Having done a functional comparison, a quick look at pricing demonstrates why Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu called Salesforce.com still very expensive:

No wonder Larry Dignan at ZDNet declares “Zoho aims to poach Salesforce.com customers.” But Larry (and Marc), you ain’t seen nothing yet… just wait till Zoho comes out with a Salesforce.com importer .

Clearly, Salesforce.com does keep a close eye on Zoho, otherwise why would they spend money on the Google Adword “Zoho CRM“?

But again, reality check: Salesforce.com does own the Enterprise space. For now.

Finally, a word about integration. After all, Zoho is known for their almost endless range of products, they should work together… Currently Zoho Sheet, the spreadsheet application is fully integrated with CRM – most data can be edited either inside CRM or in the spreadsheet format that many business users are more familiar with.

Zoho plans to integrate Writer, their word processor, Mail (still in private beta) as well as some of the business applications, namely recently released Invoice and People. When all that’s done, Zoho will have a more complete offering than two industry giants, Salesforce.com and Google together. I can’t wait…

(Disclaimer: I am an Advisor to Zoho. Take anything I say with a grain of salt. In fact with a pound of salt. Don’t believe a single word of mine about Zoho products: go ahead and check them out yourself).

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: crm, Enterprise Software, erp, On-Demand, SaaS, salesforce.com, small business software, smb, sme, zoho

3 Half-Truths about SaaS

Posted on April 11, 2008 ·

I am a big fan of Software as a Service, but it frustrates the hell out of me to see industry pundits over-hype it without really understanding it. Here are 3 killer (in the bad sense) half-truths about SaaS:

1 – SaaS is simpler, easier to implement than On-premise software (see update at the bottom)

2 – SaaS is for the SMB market

3 – SaaS is bought, not sold, it’s the end of Enterprise Sales

Let’s examine them in detail:

1 – SaaS is simpler, easier to implement than On-premise software.

The only part that’s absolutely true is the technical installation, which the customer no longer has to worry about with SaaS. But we all know that this is a fraction of a typical implementation. Implementations are all about business process and training, hence the difficulty / duration / cost of an implementation depends on the complexity of business and the size of the organization – these two tend to correlate with each other.

It just so happens that all SaaS solutions so far have started (and many stay) at the SMB level, so they are simpler not by virtue of being SaaS but by their target market’s needs.

2 – SaaS is for the SMB market

Yes, traditionally all SaaS started with Small Businesses, but that does not mean it may not move upstream. Salesforce.com and several HCM applications have proven technical scalability, but they offer partial / departmental functionality.
I am a strong believer that in 4-5 years most software developed will be SaaS, and that in 10 years it will be the predominant method of “consuming” software by large enterprises – but I can’t prove it. There’s no empirical evidence, since there has not been any Integrated Enterprise SaaS available so far. The closest to it is NetSuite today (but it’s still SMB focused), and SAP’s Business ByDesign tomorrow. In fact despite SAP’s official positioning, driven by market focus and current limitations (functional and infrastructure), I believe that SAP will use BBD to learn the SaaS game – i.e. BBD will be a test bed for a future Enterprise SaaS offering. But we’re not there yet.
(longer discussion here)

3 – SaaS is bought, not sold, it’s the end of Enterprise Sales

Hey, I’ve said this myself, so it must be true (?). Well, it depends on the position of the sun, the constellation of the stars, and several other factors, but mostly the first two we’ve just covered.

SaaS for very small business: that’s the clear-cut lab case for the click-to buy pull model to work. In fact in this respect (sales model) I believe the business size is the no.1 determinator. Some solutions will have to be configured and may even require pre-sales business process consulting. This inflexion point will clearly be higher for functionally simpler solutions, like CRM and lower for integrated business management systems, like NetSuite or SAP’s Business ByDesign.

Once you reach that inflexion point, you’re in a more interactive, lengthier sales process, and that’s typically face to face. At least that’s what we’re conditioned to: but it does not have to be that way. That will be the subject of another post – to come soon.

Update: Ben Kepes challenged #1 on his blog, and to some extent I have to agree. My post here is continuation of a discussion we started at the virtual SAP Marketing Community Meeting, and my mind-set was still business process software, e.g. CRM, ERP..etc, but I forgot to specify that. Instead of replicating the argument, why don’t you read my response to his response at Ben’s place.

Filed Under: Enterprise Software, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: business bydesign, netsuite, On-Demand, pull-model, SaaS, sap, sap bbd, small business software, smb, sme, software sales

Benchmarking: No Longer the Hidden Business Model in SaaS

Posted on April 9, 2008 ·

The cat is out of the bag – was my first reaction when FreshBooks announced the launch of their new benchmarking service in October 2006. Then, and later I called it the hidden business model in SaaS:

He basically announced the hidden value proposition enabled by SaaS: competitive benchmarking. All previous benchmarking efforts were hampered by the quality of source data, which, with all systems behind firewalls was at least questionable. SaaS providers will have access to the most authentic data ever, aggregation if which leads to the most reliable industry metrics and benchmarking.

With Google’s entry today, benchmarking is no longer the hidden business model: it has just gone mainstream. Potentially great value added service, a new revenue source for the provider, which may even allow them to give the core service away for free.

Give away? Do you think I’m smoking something? Read Jeremiah Owyang who predicted that storage companies will (?) eventually pay for your data.

TechCrunch Releases New Zoho Service: Invoice

Posted on March 27, 2008 ·

Yes, the title isn’t a mistake: TechCrunch is no longer just powerful media, Mike now can single-handedly release new products.. Today I spent several hours testing a pre-release product, Zoho Invoice, which was a few weeks from it’s planned launch, when TechCrunch accidentally posted the news. The Zoho Team decided to play along, and instead of disappointing TC readers with a broken link, opted to release the product immediately.

Not exactly an orderly Launch, but not the end of the world either, especially not for Zoho, which has a reputation of updating their web-based products frequently. In my early testing today I found Invoice easy to use, with a soothing, pleasant UI where all the icons are in the right place and support the right information flow. There are some features that were still under consideration as of this afternoon – so be it, this is a “forced” early release, updates and fixes will no doubt be coming soon (using the Feedback button at the top will help issues get fixed quickly).

So what do we have here? Essentially a billing application, that allows the user to create /import Clients, define items (product/service), generate estimates, convert them to invoice and accept payment against it. The Home screen is a Dashboard, providing a quick financial overview:

Information flows easily from one document to another, and there are a number of predefined (customizable) templates that can generate notification emails to the Customer at any stage. Notice the icons change on these two bars:

The Estimate (emailed or snail-mailed to the Customer) can be converted to an Invoice, but when displaying an Invoice, there’s a new icon there to enable entering a payment received.

There are transactional detail, summary, aging ..etc reports to help keep tight control of your receivables.

Although Zoho is primarily known for being the best Web-based Office / Productivity Suite provider, they are not exactly new to transactional business systems: their longest standing product is Zoho CRM (which is an understated name for a mini-ERP), the recently announced Zoho People, and a more full-featured Accounting system is in the works, too. Talk about CRM, it already has some Invoice functionality, which will later be replaced by the new module, to be integrated with CRM. For now, Zoho Invoice is integrated with Projects.

The slideshow below explains the setup, various functions and the workflow between them (click the lower right corner to switch to full-screen):

The new billing application is free up to 5 invoices a months, and there is a pricing scale depending on the number of invoices per month, from $5 incl. 25 invoices to $35 up to 1500 invoices.

The two notable competitors are BlinkSale and FreshBooks. Zoho will no doubt build on the fact that Invoice is just one piece in the puzzle of 16 or so business applications it has to offer.

(Disclaimer: I am an Advisor to Zoho)

Related posts: Webware.com, Enterprise Alley, Venture Beat, Zoho Blogs,

Filed Under: SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: billing, blinksale, business software, crm, freshbooks, SaaS, smb, Web Applications, zoho, zoho crm, zoho invoice

Zoho People: Will it Disrupt or Fail?

Posted on March 10, 2008 ·

Zoho, best known for their Web-based Productivity (Office+) Suite today released Zoho People, a feature-rich On-Demand HRMS – Human Resources Management System. For the product introduction please read my previous post, while here I focus on business analysis, specifically on what this move means to software sales in general.

Today’s product announcement signifies a departure from what Zoho has been known for so far, in a number of ways. Their primary reputation is being the best Web-based Office / Productivity Suite provider – People is clearly a process-driven, transactional system with “enterprisey” features: organization levels, work-flow, permissions…etc.

It’s not an entirely new field for Zoho though, as their CRM solution has been gaining traction for years now – both in terms of new customers as well as converts from the market leader. (See chart with full list of Productivity and Business Apps). As a matter of fact, I’ve often stated calling it CRM is an understatement: with Sales Order Management, Procurement, Inventory Management, Invoicing it’s really more of a mini-ERP. Add to it Accounting and HCM and Zoho can come up with an unparalleled Small Business Suite, which includes the productivity suite (what we now consider the Office Suite) and all process-driven, transactional systems: something like NetSuite + Microsoft, targeted at SMB’s, perfectly rhyming with Zoho’s stated objective of becoming the outsourced IT for small businesses.

Except… well, Zoho People is not a small business system. All you have to do is look at some of the organizational setup, or processes, like holiday, training, leave requests, company policies to realize that this system is ideally suitable for organizations with a few hundred employees and more. (The “M” in SMB, whereas most of Zoho’s focus has been on the “S” until now). So it’s a departure from Zoho’s traditional target market, and by its very nature it’s not a system individuals or small groups would just start to use in an ad-hoc manner. It’s a system to be introduced by HR for the entire company.

Bringing an enterprise system to the market typically requires a different approach, a coordinated marketing and sales effort, supplemented by consulting and support – i.e. all the extra weight that makes enterprise software “big and fat”. Yet Zoho just throws it out in the open, like they did with Writer, Sheet or any one of the dozen or so productivity tools. They have no clue how to market enterprise software! – one might say… and do they, really?

Simply announcing enterprise software without marketing and sales is certainly a risky proposition. Any startup that does with their main product is doomed to fail. Yet Zoho can afford an experiment. The new HCM system is just one product in their portfolio, in fact the entire Zoho portfolio is just a big experiment of the parent company, privately held and profitable Adventnet. CEO Sridhar Vembu repeatedly stated his mission is to commoditize software, delivering it to large masses at previously unseen prices.

There’s all this talk about how SaaS changes the economics of Software – pull vs push process, try-and-buy vs. the expensive enterprise sales process; but it mostly refers to the SMB space. The try-and-buy, self-serve model is almost unheard of amongst larger organizations and more complex software. It traditionally needs more cajoling and hand-holding. But why not break away from tradition? Why should all innovation stay on the product side? Zoho goes the extra mile to make the new system more “consumable”: screenshot tours, demo videos abound. Of course disruptive pricing does not hurt, either.

If Zoho People fails to gain traction, so be it: the company will likely focus on their main avenue of becoming the IT provider for SMB’s, integrate features from People into Zoho Business and CRM, and figure out how to crack the HCM market later. If, however it starts gaining traction, it’s a good signal to the entire SaaS industry: an indication that transparency, online information and help works, the try-and-buy model may just be feasible even with larger organizations, which, for the first time will buy Software as a Service instead of being sold to by pushy enterprise sales teams.

(Disclaimer: I am an Advisor for Zoho.)

Filed Under: Business, Enterprise Software, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: Enterprise Software, hcm, hris, hrms, On-Demand, pull-model, SaaS, software sales, try-and-buy, zoho, zoho crm, zoho people