AccMan: Just how far are we on the saas/on-demand journey

Dennis Howlett gives a good perspective on some of the SaaS solutions out there. Many of these vendors seem to struggle with integration / interoperability. This could be a choice not to integrate, but in many cases it could also come down to plain old development costs or localisation issues ... Nevertheles a challenge.

... A recent email from a company in the market for an on-demand business solution got me thinking about the current state of play. This particular company is a NetSuite user. It is thoroughly ticked off with what it sees as early stage, buggy software. It runs an operation which uses an online shopping cart that ’should’ feed seamlessly to the back end accounting and it wants CRM capability. It’s a 6 person business.

I was hard pressed to provide an alternative vendor operating in the UK capable of providing that level of functionality, though I did point them to Pearl and Twinfield as possible contenders. Xero looks cool but doesn’t really have the capabilities this company wants. The company said it is seriously considering Salesforce.com for CRM and hoped there is an accounting vendor that plugs into the SFdC platform. There is - but not for the UK, or rather not for a company of this size.

I was struck by two things:

• Salesforce.com has clearly done a great job of grabbing mindhsare. I’ve said before that potential customers of all sizes but especially small businesses are now looking closely at SFdC as a supplier. A year ago they would not have bothered.
  
• Despite its size, the company is asking for sophisticated capabilities. It seems that even the smallest of organizations has a level of expectation with which the vendor community struggles. ...

Source: Just how far are we on the saas/on-demand journey
Author: Dennis Howlett
Date Published: Wed, 26 Sep 2007