The Software-as-a-service (SaaS) trend is converting conventional software vendors and giving rise to web- only competitors.
Even if you don’t have the skills or interest in selling SaaS you should probably still try to keep abreast of the field.
Thanks to the wave of cloud hype sweeping through public discussion, your customers will have at least heard of the concept and will want to be reassured that you have some knowledge of it too.
Here is a list of some of the most important SaaS services that you should know about.
Productivity
Cloud productivity suites will likely have a much greater impact than the sum of their applications. Office 365 and Google Apps instantly wipe out the email server and start the migration of the file server to the cloud.
The implications for resellers who have built their enterprise around selling Small Business Server are pretty stark – hang onto the status quo while it lasts or change to the new world order.
Microsoft says it is still committed to Small Business Server, and the Essentials version which is optimised for the cloud should give the franchise a longer lease on life – as soon as the plugin for Office 365 is released.
Office 365
This is the big one for many resellers. Businesses of all sizes using Microsoft Office are likely to realise improved operations using the cloud version of the suite. Office 365 brings enterprise terms like collaboration and unified communications to small businesses without forcing them to learn new interfaces or applications. It all looks like Office and feels like Office.
Commissions for Office 365 are recurring year on year as long as the customer maintains the reseller as the partner of record. This is an incentive for the partner to make sure the customer is happy. But it also means a reseller can’t rely on the income indefinitely, as a bigger player might come in with a managed services contract or larger deal that swallows up the licensing for Office 365.
Google Apps
Google Apps has plenty of potential in the small businesses market. It may not have the familiar Microsoft interface but it’s simple to use and it’s cheap. The Apps Marketplace has a huge number of applications that integrate to various degrees with the applications within Google Apps. And there will be many more resellers pushing Office 365 than Google Apps, so competition should be a little less intense.
One downside is that Google is much better at making things than marketing them. Microsoft resellers are being backed up by a huge advertising campaign on Cloud Power, whereas Google seems too busy developing the next great application to bother with the mundane issues of selling the stuff. It’s a pity.
CRM
Deciding on a CRM (customer relationship management) package can be quite a personal choice. SMBs used to have little option but to go with one on-premise vendor after a short demo with test data rather than their own. Now SaaS CRM can be trialled online with live company data which gives SMBs a better chance at finding the one that fits best. The likelihood is that many SMBs are using a combination of Outlook and Excel to manage their sales pipeline. Moving to a proper CRM could help a business become more aware of the sales cycle and encourage better monitoring of incoming cash flow and potential deals.
SalesForce.com
The number one SaaS CRM application keeps growing. It’s not just the features which keep popping up in the SalesForce Sales Cloud but the expanding ecosystem of products. SalesForce has acquired Heroku, a platform for building apps on Ruby and Java, and Database.com, a cloud-native database. And then there’s Chatter, a private social media network for businesses that is integrated into SalesForce itself.
SalesForce’s Force.com has become a favoured platform for designing applications for enterprise. All these projects increase the value of choosing SalesForce.com as your CRM.
Microsoft CRM Dynamics Online
It will be interesting to see how hard Microsoft pushes Dynamics Online. In Australia, at least, it feels like the thunder has been stolen by Office 365.
The Dynamics Online website shows that Microsoft will be aiming for market share. In the centre of the page is a competitive-price calculator displaying the savings in choosing Dynamics over SalesForce. com or Oracle. Dynamics retails for US$44 per user per month.
BatchBook and High Rise
These two CRM packages have been making a name for themselves in small business circles. The relatively high prices charged by SalesForce. com have opened up a market for SMBs looking for a cloud solution that is easy to use and robust.
REMOTE MANAGEMENT
This is an odd one to slip in with SaaS as it bends the definitions slightly. However, Microsoft is keen to include the category as part of its online services and the tools have been rewritten to scale in much the same way as SaaS.
Microsoft Windows InTune
Microsoft labels InTune as SaaS even though it relies on an agent downloaded to the PC.
InTune is a Kaseya competitor which monitors the health of PCs in a business network, takes a running inventory of hardware and software, and provides anti-virus and malware protection. It also comes with a Windows 7 Enterprise subscription.
Savvy cloud resellers are bundling this with Office 365 because it gives them visibility of the customers’ networks, opening the door to more sales opportunities, and reduces the number of support calls because all machines are running on the latest operating system.
ERP
Given the complexity of ERP (enterprise resource planning) software it’s a little surprising to hear that it actually works in the cloud. It definitely does, though the bugbear of customisation and long install times make this a tougher sell than other SaaS products.
There is a lot of opportunity in this space as some vendors have been slow to move beyond on- premise systems (hi SAP) as have their partners.
NetSuite
NetSuite announced at its partner and customer conference earlier in the year that it would be looking further up the chain, beyond mid-market.
The vendor is confident that it has what the resosurces to take on SAP and Oracle.
The fastest growing financial management system in the US for the past three years, NetSuite has impressed with its levels of automation, the breadth of applications within the suite and the speed of implementation.
SAP Business By Design
The biggest name in ERP has finally cast its hat into the SaaS ring after several false starts. SAP is so heavily identified with large-scale, costly and complex on-premise deployments that it will be a real coup if it can deliver a lightweight yet powerful SaaS for SMBs.
Until there’s tangible sign of success, the jury is still out.
INTEGRATION
Integration is easier in the SaaS world as vendors will typically leave their APIs open to encourage connectivity with other applications. But building a business around integration is going to be difficult unless you specialise in detailed projects that venture further than basic contact synchronising.
SaaS vendors will work on connecting to the more popular products such as the cloud productivity suites Office 365 and Google Apps, or enterprise veterans such as SalesForce. And then you have vendors like OneSaaS that have repeatable, scalable solutions that can be sold very cheaply.
OneSaaS
OneSaaS is not a SaaS product you can resell, but it is a SaaS service of sorts that is worth keeping an eye on. OneSaaS has commoditised integration of cloud applications by charging $35 per month. If you are a software integrator then keep in mind that businesses looking for standard integration will probably be tempted by this solution rather than a $10,000 project for a bespoke solution.
Of course, if a company wants a highly specialised level of integration, OneSaaS is too generic to be a threat.
FINANCE
Accounting software is not usually an area in which resellers have a great deal of involvement. However, the cloud accounting packages
on the market can make a huge difference in simplifying how a business manages its expenses. It can also provide valuable insight into cash flow and financial trends.
These accounting programs are an easy sale to small businesses which will easily save them time and money through automatic bank feeds and one-click BAS statements. Even if you pass on the recommendation to a cloud- ready accountant, a customer will appreciate the good advice.
Xero
Xero markets itself as “beautiful accounting software”, a somewhat difficult thing to imagine until you actually try out the program. It is very easy on the eye, indeed light years away from the '70s interface of MYOB.
Xero claims to already have over half the accountants in New Zealand using its software and hopes to repeat that feat in Australia
within two years, according to the ebullient chairman Rod Drury.
The company already has amassed customers in the UK and intends to take on the mighty American market, which so many Australasian accounting vendors have failed to penetrate.
Saasu
Saasu has been around for a decade – quite amazing. It is a strong competitor to Xero but has a much broader feature set, the most notable additions being payroll and inventory. In some instances companies have “downsized” to Saasu from ERP systems, which demonstrates that the software is highly capable.
The enterprise edition upgrades the inventory to serialised with item attributes such as size, weight and colour to manage specific stock. You can set expiry dates for food, licences and other time-based uses.
Jcurve
Few people would have heard of NetSuite reseller JCurve, but that will likely change in the coming year. The reseller-cum-developer is releasing cut-down versions
of NetSuite for small business, including one product that will compete with Xero and Saasu and cost as little as $50 a month.
Even though JCurve is coming late to the cloud accounting party, it does have one pretty special advantage. The entry-level JCurve Financials, a basic MYOB competitor for small businesses, is built on the same platform as the enterprise-grade NetSuite. A fast-growing company just has to turn on more features to move from accounting package to full-blown ERP, with no upgrades necessary.
That’s quite an incentive for ambitious business owners.
STORAGE
How soon will the file server move to the cloud? Probably not as quickly as other applications, as many file servers contain hundreds of useless files that a business rarely
looks at. There is little advantage to putting them in the cloud until the server dies and forces some action. But the 20 percent of files which
a business views, edits and creates every day are prime data for a cloud service. The ability to access them from any location means SMB owners don’t need to head into the office on the weekend to check a document or find a phone number.
Box
Box (formerly Box.net) has aspirations to compete with SharePoint Online. Box syncs files to the desktop like DropBox for offline access but has more controls for access and permission settings.
Box burnishes its collaboration credentials with online workspaces, which makes an internal folder public so it can be shared with suppliers and customers, for example. Users can post comments, add basic tasks and track file versions.
Box is integrated with Google Apps, Salesforce.com and NetSuite and could be a good companion sell for a business that prefers the Box interface and centralised document management.
Sharefile and Dropbox
Dropbox came under some heavy fire recently for claiming to encrypt customers’ data so that it couldn’t be read by Dropbox administrators when in fact it wasn’t encrypted. It didn’t help that the service already had a reputation as being more consumer than business oriented. This hasn’t stopped small businesses adopting Dropbox as an easier way to share files.
Sharefile is considered a more corporate friendly alternative for, well, sharing files. The vendor has three million users and has customised its online storage for several industries.
ShareFile’s main purpose is to send large or sensitive files without using FTP or courier services. It lets businesses use their own logos on the site interface for a more professional look.
Rackspace cloud drive and Amazon cloud drive You would think that these two would have come up with a different name. Cloud Drives including Microsoft’s Sky Drive are destined to replace smaller sized external hard drives. Maybe not the family videos shot in high- definition, but a small business or sole trader that takes an external drive home from the office with the day’s backup might look at something like this.
The obvious comparison is that a cloud drive is backed up within Amazon or Rackspace’s own highly redundant infrastructure.
If you drop that external drive on the way to the car your data might not be so lucky.
SECURITY
Security in the cloud is highly competitive and vendors seem to be fighting against a commoditisation trend. This has not been helped by Google and Microsoft, which give away top-notch security as part of their productivity suites (Google’s Postini and Microsoft’s Forefront, respectively).
Symantec.cloud, trend micro and Websense SaaS security is divided into three main camps. End-point protection, which uses an agent to enforce security policies but
is managed from a web-based console; web monitoring, which stops users from visiting unsafe or unapproved websites; and data loss prevention, or DLP, which attempts to stop corporate secrets from being emailed out from the corporate intranet.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Business intelligence (BI) analysis is another product that was reserved for larger companies which could afford to buy a server whose job would be to interrogate a database server to build analytical reports. Cloud-based BI tools can do the same task after they have been configured properly, and without the cost or delay of setting up a purpose-built server.
MyDials, Yellowfin
These two competitors use interactive dashboards to display critical business information in easy-to-read ways. Process flow, productivity, product capability, revenue – pick a metric that best describes the health of your customer’s business.
One of the biggest issues with selling BI tools is that you need to have a very quick implementation process to set up a demonstration, otherwise the cost of sale becomes too great. Consequently, the SMB market is relatively untouched when it comes to selling business intelligence services, so there is potential for a keen reseller.
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