SaaS and Cloud questions of the week 09/09

September 9th, 2010

SaaS and Cloud questions of the week 09/09In this post, we are publishing the most popular questions from Answers@Getapp.com If you are not registered yet, don’t be shy and join in to share your expertise or ask the questions that keep you up at night !

Business-critical servers: premise-based, hosted, co-located or cloud-based ?

How best to decide whether to run a particular business-critical function on in-house servers, shared hosted servers, dedicated hosted/co-located servers or cloud-based servers? What criteria matter most to which types of businesses when making such decisions?

Small business ERP?

We need to improve the way our agents are following up with [...]

SaaS vendors know why you buy. Do you agree?

September 7th, 2010

SaaS vendors know why you buy. Do you agree?A detailed article on one of our favorite topics was recently published in the Summer 2010 Newsletter of the Softletter SaaS University Journal. It talks about the reasons why companies purchase SaaS (on-demand) business solutions, or to be more accurate, why SaaS vendors think their customers by their products.
The generally accepted reason why businesses buy SaaS is Capex vs. Opex (capital expenditures vs. operating expenditures) or in other terms, shifting software expenditure from capital budgets to operating ones. But Softletter’s findings seem to demonstrate that the growth of SaaS has not been [...]

What is your favorite mobile device for business Apps ?

September 7th, 2010

What is your favorite mobile device for business Apps ?As the adoption rates of mobile smartphones and tablets (I.E. BlackBerry, iPhone/iPad, Android, and Windows Phone devices) continue to rise and the devices become an essential tool for the enterprise workforce, it is becoming crucial for any vendor out there to offer a mobile version of its solutions. SaaS and Cloud based apps are obviously well prepared to serve this new audience of mobile workers: they can be accessed from a simple browser and usually do not require too much bandwidth to operate (a 3G connection is more than enough).
That said, [...]

Top Tips for Sales & Marketing on a Budget

August 31st, 2010

Top Tips for Sales & Marketing on a BudgetFollowing up from our previous post on “Are customer acquisition costs killing your software business ?” we came across this great article from Kevin Dobbs at Montclair Advisors which gives some useful tips on Sales and Marketing strategies for SaaS vendors
12 Tips – Sales & Marketing on a Budget
When advising software clients who are interested in moving to a SaaS business model, one of the areas I really dig into is how are they selling to new customers. Most of us in the SaaS community realize that carefully tracking your Customer Acquisition [...]

SaaS and Cloud questions of the week 31/08

August 31st, 2010

SaaS and Cloud questions of the week 31/08The Q&A site is growing with over 250 users posting more than 500 questions already. In this post, we are publishing the most recent ones . If you are not registered yet, don’t be shy and join in to share your expertise or ask the questions that keep you up at night !

Online backup software for a 5 computer office?

What back up software would you recommend to support a small office (5 networked computers)? I want something that will do 2X daily automatic back ups without any extra buttons to click. What software [...]

Are customer acquisition costs killing your software business ?

August 27th, 2010

Are customer acquisition costs killing your software business ?It is amazing that small software vendors are spending more than 50% of their revenues on customer acquisition!
A recent survey from TrialPay on software customer acquisition methods shows the discrepancies  between marketing  costs for small and larger software vendors. 
The key takeaways from the survey include:
1) Software companies spend on average 39% of revenues on customer acquisition. This number varies dramatically based on size, with larger companies spending considerably less. Vendors with more than $5M in annual revenue  spend about 17%  of revenues on customer acquisition, vendors with revenue included between [...]

What is your favorite PaaS for business Apps ?

August 24th, 2010

What is your favorite PaaS for business Apps ?Over the last years, software development of new Web Apps designed to be run in the Cloud has gone under a major shift, moving away from the “usual suspects” Java, C#, .NET, PHP, etc,.. to the so called PaaS environment (Platform As a Service). In a nutshell, PaaS is the ability to leverage an underlying cloud based infrastructure (also called IaaS) to build Web Apps offered as a Service (also called SaaS). Large SaaS providers were the pioneered in the PaaS world, as an attempt to increase their application wallet share through [...]

Is Cloud Computing / SaaS a wonder drug with nasty side effects ?

August 23rd, 2010

Is Cloud Computing / SaaS a wonder drug with nasty side effects ?Cloud-based / SaaS applications are seeing an amazing adoption rate by SMBs and enterprise business department who find in them a low risk opportunity to easily deploy solutions that have an immediate impact on productivity improvements.
But some industry experts keep on arguing about the boomerang effect of uncontrolled SaaS applications deployment. One of the most heard is the issue of data integration and co-existence between legacy apps and new SaaS apps.
In a recent article from Processor on Cloud Data Integration Services , the author Kurt Marko and a [...]

SaaS & Cloud Channel strategies: need for a new channel ?

August 20th, 2010

SaaS & Cloud Channel strategies: need for a new channel ?At GetApp.com we have always been convinced that a new channel will need to emerge soon to address the challenges faced by the Cloud vendors as well as the traditional vendors embracing a SaaS strategy.
With the advent of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the software vendor is now responsible for the delivery, hosting, upgrades and support of the application  Is there enough work (and money ?) for the traditional channel partners to engage with customers and be viable in this scenario ?
In the mean time millions of SMBs are embracing every day business [...]

SaaS and Cloud questions of the week 19/08

August 19th, 2010

SaaS and Cloud questions of the week 19/08Even during the summer holiday season, lots of people are visiting our Q&A site and posting new questions which need answers from the expert community. In this post, we are publishing the most recent ones . If you are not registered yet, don’t be shy and join in to share your expertise or ask the questions that keep you up at night !

Recommendation on inventory software for a shipping-receiving, manufacturing, sales, stock management ?

I have read some positive reviews about inFlow as a basic inventory system but not sure if it can fulfill [...]