SaaS
Posts on SaaS, software as a service
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Sightings in SaaS
Life of a SaaS Consultant
NetSuite OneWorld Implementation Released!
The NetSuite Implementation Book is Published
Nearly 400 pages of NetSuite, from basic questions of what you need to know about NetSuite's place in the ERP/CRM market, to how to get started with the account setup, and details about how to setup specific business models work in OneWorld; I packed a lot into these 400 pages. I'm glad I wrote it and, frankly, I'm glad it's done. I think it will add some value to the NetSuite 'Economy', at least that's my hope. As the first integrated SaaS suite, or actually the only integrated SaaS suite, NetSuite deserves a wide audience. What Evan Goldberg and his development crew have accomplished is truly amazing in my view, and I hope my 400 pages help to tell the story to prospective clients and move the ball down the field a bit. Couple of first downs – I'd be happy.
I'll say this: My nights and weekends are free again. Time for family, house projects – the list is longer than normal, my old hobbies. What were those again? If you're interested in seeing the TOC and learning more about the book, there are several pages devoted to the book at the publisher's, Packt Publishing, website. Start here: http://www.packtpub.com/netsuite-oneworld-implementation-2011-r2/book. There is also a sample chapter.
I have also setup a website for the book – http://www.owimplementation.com. If you have questions or comments about the book I welcome them and will do my best to stay on top of your queries. If anything in the book confuses please let me know and I will do my best to make a better explanation.
The book is also available now on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/NetSuite-OneWorld-Implementation-2011-R2/dp/1849681325/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1325128417&sr=8-2. An electronic version is also available for you kindle or i-pad.
The audience for the book includes any business person currently thinking about NetSuite as their business management system, anyone currently implementing or using NetSuite who wants to exploit all of its functionality, and anyone who is going to be part of a NetSuite project, whether you are an in-house resource or a third party consultant.
Interested in NetSuite to run your business?
It makes sense to take a deep dive on NetSuite or NetSuite OneWorld before you sign a contract. It's a big commitment and and it's hard to find a resource that provides both the detail and the broad overview that you need. This book has both. It explains NetSuite in the context of both software as a service and the integrated suite for business management. It also provides a lot of important details about setting up your account and configuring the modules you need, by business model.
Running a NetSuite Implementation? Planning to Join One?
If a NetSuite implementation is in your future then you really should take a look at this book. How do you structure a software as a service implementation? What's the best way to analyze the business, fit it to NetSuite, configure and prototype, test, convert and customize. The detail to help you understand matters small and large is here, focused by our experience with over 60 full life cycle implementations.
Do you already have NetSuite?
And want to exploit more of its functionality for your business? Or are you an IT pro who wants to make the switch to the cloud and is need a detailed book on NetSuite? This book will help to focus your account and give you a lot of ideas about how to use the NetSuite system to help the business.
AisleBuyer: At the Intersection of Consumer and Enterprise Technology
Where Many Goliaths Have Failed, A David Comes Forward
Thinking about it now, the David and Goliath metaphor may not work perfectly, but it does quickly focus this post. The enterprise world has spent untold billions of treasure on customer relationship management over the past two decades, and you have to ask to what avail? For the business to business organizations, one understands giving sales and channel partners a solution. But for retailers, the value of CRM has been difficult to ascertain. E-commerce might be slightly better because you have transaction record with an identity. But getting to really know your customers, to the point where you have something approaching a relationship, has been the proverbial mirage of retail, and CRM generally. We have the little keychain ID cards for the local grocery stores, but have not yet received a personalized alert that the groceries we tend to buy seasonally have gone on sale, or that this group of items is available at a discount. You would think that after three or four years they would know us better.
AisleBuyer is out to change all that. By offering consumers an easy to use tool to shop, research in store, review promotions, order and checkout and by offering retailers a rules based marketing platform integrated with their back office inventory and the other systems, AisleBuyer bridges the divide between the customer and the 'store'; it's real time CRM initiated by the customer for the customer's benefit. (There's a novel concept.)
Loaded onto thousands of servers the world over are massive CRM systems that try to make heads or tails of customer behavior after the fact, when the customer has long since checked out and driven home, maybe even moved to another city. But for all the data, the information is sparse. AisleBuyer not only lets you see real time what the individual shopper scans and buys, but what they scanned and did not buy. For example, if they scan a sweatshirt in medium but put it down, and inventory in large is unavailable in the store, AisleBuyer can alert you that other sizes are available and let you place the order right on your phone.
Shoppers can now research the products they are interested in while in the aisle and holding them, simply by using the AisleBuyer app and their smartphone's camera/scanner. And when a retailer's rules sense that you are interested in a clock radio, they can dial up a promo on the spot. When you make your selection, you add the item to your cart, literal and virtual, and move on. When you are done shopping, you checkout and pay online. No more put it in the cart, remove it from the cart and put it back in the cart. When you are done shopping, you checkout as you stroll to the door, where you show a store clerk your smartphone order.
Retailers, manufacturers and consumers all have their own good reasons to use a service like AisleBuyer: The ability to connect with your customer real time for the retailer; a data store for the manufacturer; and true convenience for the shopper.
The technology landscape is littered with the wreckage of large tech companies who tried a consumer offensive, as detailed in this NYT article, where consumer world is referred to bleakly as the "Afghanistan" of enterprise technology. So what makes AisleBuyer different. In a word it's simplicity. The user interface of the smartphone app is simple and straightforward. All the complexity is hidden behind the scenes where AisleBuyer's web APIs integrate volumes of data with retailer's back office systems and the their own marketing platform.
While large tech companies would do well to tread lightly in the consumer space, large retailers have some quick decision making at hand. The adoption of smart phones is changing the way we communicate, compute and live; and the rate of adoption has accelerated so fast recently that many retailers were caught off guard – they did not budget in 2011 for mobile shopping. At this point they can try to build it themselves or they can use a service like AisleBuyer – in either an on-demand version, or on premise if the retailer insists.
AisleBuyer does more than just mobilize the store and give retailers a strategy to compete with e-commerce, it also arms store personnel with an app that gives them the ability to be real value add to the customer. The clerk app offers a veritable knowledge base of information on products. Imagine a harried clerk being able to stop and answer your question right in the aisle without using the obnoxious store wide loudspeaker phone. Your shoppers might actually ask a question that leads to a sale.
System complexity is often the result of trying to mirror human behaviour and its off the charts idiosyncrasies. But what if you don't try mirror behavior but simply capture it as it happens. How does that change the enterprise CRM game? Instead of waiting for customers to line up and walk through our predefined corn maize, you let the customer behave and you simply respond as a fascinated, helpful third party.
We, or at least I, have long questioned whether our systems were off on a tangent, trying desperately to keep up with a marketplace that cares nothing for processes or transaction conformity. Sometime in this business, as in life, we don't actually answer the question, so much as the questions become moot and we move along to, inevitably, new questions. If you accept the premise that AisleBuyer is an enterprise CRM system, and I do, then the next step is to ask is does it provide a new question about how CRM is going to operate in the future: Customer driven, customer focused, process and transaction lite? Where does that leave the massive CRM systems we have struggled under these many years?
The other question you can't help but ask is how a service like AisleBuyer ramps up in the market. Large retailers might each bring it on-premise and then go through the typical heavy lifting of sourcing infrastructure, laying pipe, etc. Each install will be different because each retailer has a custom back end integration project; but the big boys have full wallets, or so I hear in the press. On the other end of the sprectrum small retail chains could swap out AisleBuyer for a majority of their POS terminals. And if AisleBuyer was already integrated with a SaaS back end, say NetSuite or Business By Design, all mutual customers could avail themselves of the magic without having separate integration projects. Just another huge benefit of the SaaS model.
SaaS ERP Migration: Question Is Not When But How?
One of my linkedIn groups is having a discussion about the mass migration to ‘Cloud’ ERP. There have been several good posts that covered everything from control, licensing, security, definition of cloud, etc. It’s the sort of discussion that the EI’s used to have a few years back on a regular basis. We were probably a little early, and the topic is certainly ripe for more robust discussion today.
Unless of course they have already been through the best of breed skirmishes of earlier corporate IT visions. If their career stretches back to the 80′s, boy I’m really dating myself now, they will look at the series of bridges they need to take one at a time and wonder if they lead anywhere useful and promising. What’s the final destination? Confusion? Spaghetti code that no one understands? Wasted resources running in circles trying to find the cause of a problem that might be in one of four systems, or worse the code that connects them? It’s not an inspiring vision.
The newly minted corporate leader doesn’t have any of the old, jagged scars from the best of breed era. They show up at Dreamforce 2011 and it never occurs to them that while the CRM may be robust, the connections to the rest of the their organization’s systems are as fragile and fraught with issues as ever. If you stretch out your IT resources that far to link disparate systems, will the line hold? For how long?
The question that must be asked is “What’s another way to win here?” Not yet possessing the will to go all in for the whole organization, and with vague memories of the IT department broken into tribes – each devoted to their own application, the experienced leader trains the eye on a division, a smaller unit where you can place a big important bet and watch how it works up close and in detail. This is a wise move. Instead of fighting the last IT war of best of breed giving way to the integrated suite, start with the victor and move forward. The integrated suite won, let’s be honest. But the on-premise suite does have a price: It’s complex and difficult to install and implement. It also carries large annual maintenance fees, and the talent you need to acquire in order to keep it operational is significant.
Now the question becomes “Is SaaS a better way to run the company on a suite?” The best way to find out may be to implement it for a division and monitor the process closely. Some of the question you’ll want answered: How long to implement? How wide was the gap between our process requirements and the delivered suite? Were we able to customize and plug the gap? How did employee training go? Was the UI intuitive? Do the departments communicate well in the suite, like sales to operations and operations to finance? Does it provide the metrics we need to understand and control our business? If we need to link it to another app, is it possible? Is it open to vendors, customers, partners, other employee users outside the mainstream heavy users? Does it make sense financially?
You can guess at all of the questions, or a highly paid software analyst can guess for you, but you probably did not come to your current position because you ignore or avoid risk. You learned to manage risk, and using a division to prove the SaaS suite, one way or the other, is an excellent risk stategy.
Does Social Add Complexity or Replace It?
Listening last week to salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote address at DreamForce 2011, I started to see social and enterprise apps come together in a more meaningful integration than I had seen before.
Suffice it to say that a lot of enterprise software analsysts have been very cool to the idea of the social enterprise. This is unfortunate because it suggests a lot of confusion on all sides. The advocates of social sometimes seem to beat a drum about either the tools of social networking or they have a quasi political slant. In either case, the effort to muddle through to some reasonable view seems too great and people throw their hands up and say, Non Mas. I can’t blame them.
In fact the keynote address had some elements of this, as well. The social contact is an idea in a lot of CRM systems offer now, and there’s nothing particulary wrong with it, but I doubt it adds a lot of value. I can only imagine what a company looking at my social profile might determine from the wisecracks I make to nephews and siblings on Facebook, or the rather mundane tech slant of my Twitter account. LinkedIn might be slightly more interesting in a high stakes B2B sale, but hardly worth the effort.
When we move from the social contact to the social employee, though, the view finally starts to clear up. We begin to see the outlines of something damned interesting. The SF tool, Chatter, has been considerably improved and SF has started to learn how their customers want to use it. (By the way, you have to give them, sf.com, a lot of credit for taking this ‘learn by experience’ route as there are a lot of software companies their size or larger that would never have the courage to admit in public that they don’t have all the answers. Witness the current melodrama playing out at HP. Ugh.)
The result of their learning and experimentation is a social tool with the potential to make the user’s company and processes better over time, and to make the software better as well. I guess I’m taking a bit of a leap here, but after a lifetime of watching software’s futile attempt to model our ungovernable lives, I have a real soft spot for a ‘simple’ little tool like Chatter that can help us manage the 20% of transactions that somehow veer away from the prosaic norm.
Think about the small manufacturing company that makes 5 assemblies from 200 items or subassemblies, each of which can be purchased from at least two vendors. What’s the problem, right? Well, normally it’s not a big deal, but there’s a little bump in sales and a lost purchase order and now you’re scrambling to get orders out. If you have BIG ERP there are ways of altering the manufacturing plan. Will take months to setup, train and then days to perform, but it can be done. But with Chatter, these types of snafus are remediated through a collaboration of your operations manager, your vendors and your sales manager. People spend their time solving problems, not working the software plan. You can see that you don’t have to have nearly the same amount of complexity in your ERP system, when you depend on collaboration to solve the one offs, instead of layering solutions in the software code.
On the other hand, a lot of Chatter can driver users nuts, but hopefully we’ll get to the point where we have the right people working to solve the right problem with just the chatter it requires, and little more. There may be hope for enterprise software yet.
Software Atomization
The first best of breed software that we helped to replace was Cullinet’s A/P system. It was 15 years ago, a number hard to believe even as I type it. The company was a Fortune 500 goliath with an enormous IT department. Their goal was to eliminate a slew of legacy applications in favor of the integrated Oracle Suite. So how did it go?
Well, we were able to replace A/P, G/L and the whole Human Resource Management System, including Payroll. However, when it came to the Order Management, Billing and A/R systems Oracle fell on its face, frankly. And when it came to running the parent’s many overseas subsidiaries it was a ‘one and never again’ proposition. After the Netherlands office of 25 users went live after almost a year of effort, the parent pulled back, and with good reason.
Just to put the whole experience into some perspective, about half way through the project, Oracle released the first klugy version of the 10.7 three tier architecture in which the application rendered in a sort of browser window. This eliminated the need for patches to be installed at the client and the server. We thought it was cool. But Oracle’s main marketing strategy at that time was the integrated suite on the universal database. The goal was to run a global company on a single database with a single instance of the integrated applications. Your entire business management software from a single company. Not many people thought it was possible. Fewer thought it was wise.
So now here we are in 2011 and the software landscape has changed tremendously. SAP and Oracle are now the legacy apps. Most of the on-premise application vendors have been consolidated under a few large corporate flags because consolidation is what happens when growth come to a screeching halt. The real growth is in software as a service, SaaS. We hear a lot about the cloud, social and mobile as well.
Yet, there are still a lot of voices talking about the integrated suite. That this is still a topic of discussion is interesting. You would have thought that the point had been settled a while ago. Who wants to manage several different applications and try to marry them together into a coherent picture of the company. Well, apparently a lot of people do, because there are a lot of new SaaS vendors in the world and many of them offer applications for a very narrow market.
As an example, there are a couple of companies that offer subscription billing services to companies that sell a monthly service. NetSuite offers it’s own subscription billing module, but the fact that there are two major, and several minor, players in this market tells us that best of breed is not going away any time soon. In fact, BoB seems to be making a resurgence. But why?
There are a lot of reasons for this. One important one is that business models are diverse and are probably becoming more so in today’s marketplace. Companies look everywhere for competitive advantage, and they only find the depth of functionality they need to manage their advantages in best of breed.
Another important reason is that SaaS has opened up the software market in amazing new ways. Developing in the cloud means that there are recognized standards that developers follow, like web services for integration, and there are also now web native software integration services.
But perhaps the most important development in software is that companies are starting to realize that they need to be more agile and more flexible in their business models than ever, and their mission critical software also needs to reflect the same values. When, not if, you combine social and mobile with your agile business model in selling, procuring, marketing and operations, you have to have applications that reach further than the accounting centric applications of today. You have to be able to add new functionality quickly. You can’t wait for mobile selling, or mobile warehouse management, or mobile A/P.
In a recent post on www.softwareadvice.com, several voices reiterated their support for the integrated suite. We continue to take their point. There is value in the suite, undoubtedly. Michael Fauscette opines that best of breed might yet have a life:
“The things that are next to your customer, that are integral to your business model or that bring you closer to partners, those applications should be best of breed,” says Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President at IDC. “I think those are types of applications that companies are willing to invest in more.”
We also take this point. Like the subscription billing systems we mentioned above, there are some applications where you must have a depth of functionality that only a best of breed offers. But the question then becomes where can you afford to have generic functionality? A/P is often mentioned as one of those systems where you don’t need a lot of specialized functionality. However, there are a number of SaaS offerings for all manner of A/P, from simple employee and contractor expenses to more complex procure to pay systems. Evidently, there are companies out there that need very specialized functionality.
Even NetSuite, for all of their allegiance to the integrated suite in both word and deed, has validated the best of breed approach in some of their moves. They purchased best of breed professional services management software from OpenAir and hooked it with their financials; they also offer an integration with salesforce.com.
When Oracle was making the case for the integrated apps one of its main arguments was that you could not manage by real metrics if the company’s data was spread across a wide range of applications. Who can argue with that? But the question today is not whether managers have all the data they need to make decisions but whether they have the time to sit back and reflect on the past in order to take the next step forward. Is this a luxury that today’s company can afford?
Microsoft is a company that manages growth quite well. Revenue, earnings are pretty predictable, and boring. MS has fallen off the scales when it comes to innovation. Apple on the other hand creates growth and moves forward by leaps and bounds. I’m sure that Apple has plenty of data metrics, too. But innovation in any market means moving into unknown territory where there are no metrics. This is what all true growth companies must do, and you have to wonder how much value an integrated view of the company really offers them.
Day One Of NetSuite Suiteworld 2011
Some of the most interesting things I heard from Suiteworld day 1:
- “Let’s face it, no one wants to do accounting in the cloud, they want to do business processes.” From Zach Nelson’s morning Keynote yesterday. He’s right. Selling accounting in the cloud is silly. Selling a business process that includes vendors, customers, partners and your employees acting through the cloud is the way to go. We are just starting to see the possibilities here. More NetSuite B2B customers should be using vendor and customer portals, another point that Nelson mentioned.
- Accenture comes on board as a partner. This is how NetSuite is going to sell to the Fortune 500, or 2500, divisions, like the recent sale they announced, Qualcomm. Accenture can handle the integration between OneWorld and SAP or Oracle as well, to marry the NetSuite results with the HQ CRM/ERP package. Qualcomm gets to keep its investment in SAP while leveraging the cloud for easier, faster, simpler division accounting and reporting. It’s a nice marriage.
- Zach Nelson CEO started his talk by mentioning some of the small companies that started with NS when it was still NetLedger and still with the company after all these years. Wow that is significant.
- Then there was a lot of talk about bringing the robust technology of large companies to the SME (small and medium enterprise) market, while giving the large companies the agility of the SME. NetSuite went out of its way, frankly, to let their current customers and prospects understand that they are not walking away from the SME even while they pursue the Qualcomms of the world, but let’s face it this is going to be really hard to serve both masters. Not saying it’s impossible, just that it’s very difficult. The big packages software vendors, SAP, Oracle, Peoplesoft, all tried to serve the SME market after the Y2K glory days ended and it was a mess. They had the wrong ideas from start to finish, from licensing to implementation and support services, nothing worked well. They all blamed it on the robustness of the software, but my experience was that the software was not a problem at all. It was software and consulting managers who saw small deals as a waste of their time. It’s going to be interesting to see over time if NetSuite continues to serve the 5 to 50 person company, or if they see a constant movement of their best talent from the SME space to answer the needs of VIP clients.
- Rapid Deployment: Groupon’s ability to go live with 10 subsidiaries within 8 weeks of signing their contract is an awesome accomplishment. They will have all 26 live in 6 months or so. Yes, more awesome. So what does this tell you about the implementation? Did they document a lot of their work? Spend endless hours trying to get every manager on board with change? Let the consulting team take all the risk? No, what it means is that Groupon took the reins early on, as only a willing young startup can, and figures to lead pole to pole. Formality, risk aversion and stupid politics kills large company IT projects more than anything else. Makes me glad that Accenture has volunteered for that duty.
- The NetSuite economy grows in many different ways. There are more partners, both implementation and development and software. This is a good thing and really bodes well for the company. When you have mass like this it starts to create its own energy.
- Baker Tilly and RSM McGladrey are two of the largest midmarket accounting firms in the country, and now they are also NetSuite partners. Interesting that when you visit their websites, as well as Accenture’s, they each have two mentions of NetSuite. Baker Tilly has a page devoted to the relationship, and it’s probably just early days for the others, but it does give you pause. Are these folks all in on NetSuite, or are they just toe in the water and waiting to see what happens? NetSuite has had their fair share of toe in the water partners over time with little effect on results. Would be nice to see one of their all in partners brought up on stage once, like Explore Consulting in Seattle. Nelson gave Explore a shout out, but really where’s the love?
- “When you are a NetSuite customer, you are an Oracle customer,” so said Oracle rainmaker Mark Hurd. Well truism or not, some people don’t like to be reminded. Dennis Howlett remarks:
There was a sharp intake of breath among media and analysts at that one. My take? Be afraid, be very afraid. -;)
I don’t think we have to be afraid, we simply have to reasonable. If you want the quality of software, the tools, the security and robustness of the big players you are going to pay the toll. Larry is not about to apologize for creating the best database in the world and give you a break. Oracle, and by default NetSuite, will have its pound of flesh.
Thank You, Henry Taub
We came across several news articles this week announcing the passing of Henry Taub. Mr Taub was the founder of ADP or Automatic Data Processing, one of the world’s largest information services companies. You might not have heard of Henry Taub, and likewise you might not comprehend his impact on the information services industry. He was no Larry Ellison or Bill Gates, but a far simpler, humbler man, who nevertheless continues to have a lasting impact in the realm of enterprise information and computing.
The articles discussing Mr Taub and his legacy are fascinating. When you think about the simplicity of his idea, performing timely payroll services, and how he made it into such an incredible company, it’s almost hard to believe.
But that’s not the end of it. This line from WSJ really caught my attention:
The firm promised reduced clerical errors and fewer late paychecks—union rules required that workers got paid overtime when checks were late—but many employers were initially reluctant.
“The notion of letting people see your private records was pretty foreign,” said Mr. Lautenberg, who went on to become CEO of Automatic Data Processing—as the firm was renamed in 1958—and then U.S. senator from New Jersey. ADP’s red-and-white vans became a familiar sight as they delivered checks.
You might think that Mr. Lautenberg was talking about software as a service; certainly, any NetSuite solution provider has heard the objection about a company’s private records many times. That your data could be held safely and securely in a remote location, and that your data and that of many of the 550,000 other businesses ADP services could all be in the same database are still ideas that a lot of people have issues with, yet ADP continues on as strong as ever.
In many respects you could say that Henry Taub was the father of software as a service, not that he would claim the title himself. But if you think about it, what he was doing was a precursor of the modern SaaS industry. Multiple clients, one mainframe, payroll as a service.
The other thing of note about his business was that it was really enabled in large part by the hardware produced at IBM. The software and information services industries have always had this necessary relationship with the hardware guys, but what I find interesting is that by being in the right place at the right time, Taub and ADP were able to take advantage of the mainframe. It’s not like they were waiting around for the mainframe to come on the scene and then they decided to launch a payroll service. They were actually doing payrolls on adding machines and delivering them by bus in the earliest days. But you make your own breaks in this life, so when the hardware appeared they had the tools and ideas to take advantage and build a business.
I owe a personal debt of gratitude to ADP. They hired me when I was a young smart aleck and let me cut my teeth not only on information services, but on Oracle Financials, which they used for billing. I also miss business people like Henry Taub. They quietly put in the hours and the effort, built great businesses and found time for family, friends and community without a lot of fanfare. We need more Henry Taubs in the information technology business today.
Accidental Agility
Beginner’s luck. That’s the normal, time honored name for the phenomenon that I have now renamed ‘accidental agility’. You have experienced this in your own life, I’m sure. You try something brand new for the first time and you do not just do it well, but phenomenally well. Your friends are shocked. “Where did you learn ?”
But you didn’t learn. You simply picked up something new and you didn’t master it necessarily but you took a big bite out of it. You showed something extraordinary in how you handled it. If it was an athletic exercise, your muscles seemed to have had the memory of doing this a thousand other times, on your first try.
It’s hard to quantify something like beginner’s luck and I hope I never have to debate someone about it, that would be a killer. I’d have no chance, beginner’s luck or no. But it’s a common enough phenomenon that we can discuss it and ask how it happens, under what circumstances?
In the muscular example, beginner’s luck is probably simply a case of accidental agility. You may have never thrown a ball before, and in moving to throw one with no memory of previous attempts your muscles simply respond to your brain’s commands and you throw. You not only have no memory of past exploits, but none of failure either. Your muscles move forward, and snap the ball takes off like you been throwing forever.
This came to mind a few weeks back when I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about SAP’s attempt at a SaaS system, called Business By Design, or ByD. I was not going to write about it because, you know frankly, the article was kind of reheated leftovers, not the normal, crack reporting that one expects of WSJ. But then I saw another article about a tech startup that started me thinking again about what’s happening with ByD. Is this is case of a sclerotic, older company with too much at stake to fail, trying to do something that, in the end, it’s muscles simply cannot perform?
This explanation comes to mind when you look at the number of SaaS startups that have done so well over the past 5 years. There are now more than just a few of them. Startups have a ton of issues to manage, least of which is cash. But somehow, many of them have struggled and they have succeeded, where a huge, well established older company could not. Accidental agility answers this paradox.
As startups the SaaS companies had neither success nor failure memories. Theirs was a clean slate, a tabula rasa upon which they were free to write. They started small and little by little learned their craft. There was no need for braggadocio; no one had experience writing a multi-tenant business application served real time over the cloud. There was no need to make big promises and under deliver. As first movers in the market, they could start small, with low expectation and little promises and over deliver. They probably had to go forward and take a step back from time to time, reiterate their steps and start over; take several passes at something before they could say they got it right. And you know, this works. Building anything the first time is a prototype. To get something right takes time and practice.
In some of my spare time I work on wood, building furniture, mirror frames, you name it. For the larger pieces, I know where all the little mistakes are and there’s always a little part of me that wishes I had another crack at it (but with the price of wood forget it) and this makes my wife angry at me. She thinks I am being negative. But actually I am just expressing the realistic point of view that a prototype is never as good as a finished product. Trying to create a finished product in your first attempt at something is useless; it’s not going to happen. Practice really does make perfect.
The young guns in SaaS had the advantage not of beginner’s luck, but of accidental agility. Their muscles were not acclimated to success or failure so they remained agile as they went about building the service and the business model and the business. This is the startups greatest asset, this ability to do something the first time and do it not just well, but phenomenally well. My hat’s off to all of them. When I look around the software landscape I see people with walkers, a lot of coughing and phlegm, a lot of sclerosis and other ailments. It’s not pretty. SaaS is the one bright spot.
Keep this in mind if you are implementing a SaaS product, this idea of agility. Don’t try one of those ‘big bang’ projects where you spend months or years building the perfect test system on paper and then when you turn it on the whole thing comes to a screeching halt. Try the agile approach. Understand that each piece is a small prototype, be willing to bend it and bend with it. Ask a lot of questions and experiment. You won’t get everything right the first pass, but that’s ok. You’re agile now and you can change, reiterate, revisit. One small step at a time. This works.
Good News for NetSuite
This came across the wire earlier today, pretty good news for NetSuite:
I don’t have access to the whole survey but they did say this in the article:
Nucleus polled NetSuite customers to gauge their success and satisfaction with their decision to entrust mission-critical business functionality to cloud computing. Ninety percent of the customers surveyed rated their satisfaction as four or five out of five — satisfied or very satisfied, and no company rated their satisfaction below three. When asked to elaborate on the reasons for their satisfaction, NetSuite’s ability to drive cost reduction was mentioned as a key driver. By offering tremendous scalability and breadth of functionality, with little to no IT expertise required to install and manage, NetSuite has earned long-term satisfaction and loyalty. “Because the application has been validated by users as an effective tool in cost reduction, deployment footprints at existing customers are more likely to increase rather than decrease,” wrote Nucleus in the report.
I’ve long said that running a system, or especially, many systems, has a huge hidden cost. Some might get away with it by putting the brother-in-law in IT, but believe me there is no way that the systems you maintain do not have a cost, I don’t care who runs them. And there is also a cost to the systems that you do not run, mainly in the time and effort people expend manipulating data on spreadsheets.
6,600 customers, that’s pretty good, too!
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