At my company NexGen , we routinely evaluate and analyse SaaS solutions and we have been ruining an All SaaS Enterprise (ASE) for the better part of the last year (see the All SaaS Enterprise Business Case sibling article ). How well do the solutions fare? What are the benefits? What are the hassles? What is the jury still out on?
SaaS offerings
We chose applications based on our requirements, not SaaS ideology. The decisions we made are by category of application are :
Accounting – QuickBooks
Try as we might we have not yet found a suitable SaaS accounting solution that suits our company – a Singapore based start-up with a QuickBooks experienced accounting team – Quickbooks have a SaaS application but it is only availabale for the US. There are many good solutions out there, including some Asia Pacific SaaS solutions (SaaSu , Xero , and myworkspace), just none right for our situation.
Banking – CitiBank
Our executive team uses our banks SaaS account management application which utilises a dongle to create, approve and enquire on transactions amongst other things. One of the best examples of SaaS, it is easy to use and enormously valuable in that it enables even the most mobile executive to keep financial control all over the world at any time of the day.
Billing – Aria
Aria provides full customer billing lifecycle management.
Blog – WordPress , and managed Sharepoint
Both offerings provide a good quality blog as part of wider function sets.
Business Performance management / Business Intelligence – Enovation
Enovation provides an excellent easy to use and quick to value SaaS BPM offering.
Document Management – Xythos On Demand, Local storage, and Local Backup
Xythos provides a full document management solution, including online storage and access control, version control etc. We utilise the solution only to half of its full extent but it still one of the most valuable for our very mobile organisation. It ha a web absed file amanger interface but also require a local client for synchronisation of files onto a PC.
Email and Calendaring – Hosted Microsoft Exchange
We looked at Zimbra, Google apps and other solutions but a Hosted Exchange solution won for three reasons – it had the breadth of functionality we required, our users were comfortable and experienced in using it, and we could not find suitable Zimbra hosters in region. This is an area we will continue to review as there are many exciting things happening here.
Email Marketing – iContact
Email marketing is an important function for us to keep in touch with our networks. iContact does the job cleanly and well with an easy to use interface. We also looked at ConstantContact which was also a good quality product.
Fax Management - efax & physical fax machines
Despite the prevalence of email, faxes are still an important communication method. With a mobile workforce a single location specific solution was not tenable for quick communication. E-Fax allows us to receive and send faxes as if we were in the office when we are anywhere in the world. We still have physical fax machines but these are rarely used.
Intranet – Hosted Microsoft SharePoint
Sharepoint is not without its issues but it is still a good intranet solution. The hosted model and it’s availability in combination with hosted exchange made this the best intranet choice for our business.
Mind Mapping – bubbl.us
Mind Mapping is an excellent tool – I encourage everyone to add it to their office communications practices. It is not as fully featured as some of its on computer rivals but it is good enough and makes sharing and collaborating on mind maps extremely easy.
Networking - Xeequa & Linked-in
Networking is an essential function for a SaaS hub like NexGen. Linked-In is a staple personal networking and relationship management solution. Xeequa is for both individuals and their companies. It adds company to company relationships and some advanced ways to interact.
Office Productivity – MS Office (locally installed), Google Apps , Wiki, Buzzword
Unfortunately I can’t say we are all SaaS here. We use a mixture of solutions to match the requirement of the situation. For one internal project we use only Google Apps, we communicate collaborative group information via a wiki, and we use Buzzword where it makes sense, but the main product of use is MS office. This is mainly because this way of working is accepted by our staff and always accessible. There are however many areas in Office productivity that SaaS can improve on – see my SaaS Office Productivity article for my thoughts here.
Sales Management – SalesForce
Being a SaaS hub keeping track of our relationships and opportunities is core to our business so this was one of the most important pieces of our infrastructure solution. We also looked at entellium and hosted Suger CRM.
Systems Management – TriActive
A mobile workforce means, until our SaaS infrastructure is completely clientless, mobile computers and the requirement to manage them. With some Systems Management experience of my own I really appreciate the value a SaaS model brings to this area. Systems Management was formally a heavy lifting area with full time staff needed to install and maintain a local system. With TriActive you get all the functionality you need with none of this hassle.
Unified Communications / Telephony – Alianza
Our team is very mobile in both the Asia Pacific region and in the U.S. which can mean expensive phone bills. It also means that they could be hard to get hold of. When I first heard of VoIP as a SaaS product it took me a while to appreciate that business telephony does not have to be a special case and can be viewed as another business system like the rest of our platform. Amongst many other benefits, our SaaS based VoIP and IP-PBX solution from Alianza means that we have the same number wherever we are via either deskphone or softphone, and that our team can all change their call forwarding via an easy web interface
Web Meetings – GoToMeeting
Web meetings save us an enormous amount of time and money and can also be our partners preference in many situations. This is an essential piece of infrastructure and GoToMeeting is the one we rate to be the most intuitive solution by a good margin.
Website – Externally Hosted
This is a no brainer but it is important to note that it is still SaaS in a broad sense, and one of the earliest forms. You could host your website internally if you wanted to but unless there are some big reasons to do that why would you?
Wiki – Xythos , Hosted Microsoft SharePoint
Both offerings provide a good quality blog as part of wider function sets.
Benefits, Hassles and still to be decided
From our experience we have been able to compile a list of benefits of our All SaaS platform, they are :
- Interface is business focussed, not geek focussed – easy setup
- Up and running straight away
- Supports and enables an independent workforce
- Lower costs
- Less hassle
- Less downtime
- More uptime – best quality backups for quicker recovery (we have not lost one byte of data yet)
- More access (when in the office, travelling with laptop and using a foreign device)
- Running better apps than we could by ourselves (some examples are systems management, business intelligence, location independent VoIP, billing)
- Enormous upfront cost reduction
- Change is a business decision, not a technology decision
- No sleepless nights worrying about backup and stability
- New features with no upgrade pain
- Consistent cost – our systems are listed under business infrastructure on our P&L
- We know the cost of doing business every month right in front of me
- Single access point for all applications in security enabled internet accessible intranet
- Also gives independent end users control – SaaS apps are generally accessible and usable
- No application conflict worries
We also have been able to put together a list of hassles
- Dealing with many different vendors rather than one it team
- Support
- Though mostly good, is unable to advise in the context of our company
- For one product in particular remote support has been an issue, as opposed to having internal it dept. For other apps it has been fine to have email alone.
- Support is slower Finding suitable SaaS solutions for our business
And what else should be considered for your organisation :
- Internal technical resources bring product knowledge with them
- Options to suit all organisation types (i.e. we couldn’t get an adequate accounting package for a Singapore small business)
- SaaS doesn’t solve everything – solution introduction still requires co-ordination, but for user experience, not installation
- The effect of other support & training Mechanisms – On line scalable customer care – FAQ’s, Discussion boards, online support desk, pre recorded video’s, built-in helpdesks.
- How does the offering facilitate switching providers?
- Am I choosing the best product?
Are any services are deviceclient dependent?
Two applications (Offline Office Productivity, and Accounting) require local installs. Six applications require a local client installed on the users device for full functionality. Only one is very specific device dependant (Unified Communications).
The options available to run an All SaaS Enterprise are both varied and rich but there are some small holes in our ability to find the right business software solutions for every requirement. There is a long list of benefits that far outweigh the hassles. Though there are still some questions to be answered the SaaS industry is hard at work on them. Best of all we have found both an excellent solution for our business, and all the better that it is SaaS.
Also have a look at another companies All SaaS Enterprise enterprise experience.
* I also post versions of relevant AsiaPacific articles from this this blog on the SaaS Asia Pacific Community site.
