Month: March 2008

Still in the early innings for enterprise SaaS

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

As baseball season is just on the horizon, I thought it worthy to frame this post around it.  Lots of interest, investment, chatter, and you could even say hype surrounding software as a service as a delivery model for enterprise consumption of IT. 

So how much of this is actually being used in the enterprise? 

A report out of Goldman Sachs (via Mitch Betts at Computerworld) lays out that we are just in the early days of SaaS adoption in the enterprise.  The results of the survey of 100 CIOs states:

"…39% of companies still not deploying any SaaS solutions, while an additional 43% are deploying less than 5% of their software seats through SaaS."

Also interesting was what was being adopted in the next 12 months:   

  1. Web conferencing
  2. Sales force automation
  3. Learning management systems
  4. Customer relationship management (CRM) outside of sales force automation
  5. E-mail

I may be wrong, but I am not confused

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Great quote (via Ben Casnocha’s blog) that captures the essence of the challenge of leading go-to-market efforts in a young company.  This has been on my brain since I read it a few days ago.  There are many things that are not known but the key is to know how to systematically work through them while being prepared to adjust on the fly.

Why understanding what didn’t happen is more important than knowing what did

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

DashboardDashboards, business intelligence, and KPIs are some of the ways that companies achieve the goal of process visibility…or at least that is the way it is suppose to be. 

There is no shortage of tools that allow you to see what happened historically from built in reports to custom business intelligence applications.  The fundamental problem is this:  just knowing how many purchase orders, invoices, or order inquiries you sent does not mean you have visibility to the whole business process. 

The real questions are – Did they get there?  Are they being processed?  Are they in the right format?  Did I get back what I was suppose to? and many, many more.

At Hubspan our business is not business intelligence but we are in a unique position to show companies what didn’t happen.  We can do this because we can see both sides of the transaction – both sender and receiver.  We can not only see both sides but can make sure that what is sent is also received the way both sides want it to be. 

If you don’t have this view to both ends of a message then you don’t have true process visibility. 

SaaS provisioning and user credentials

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Interesting question came up the other day when discussing many of the enterprise obstacles to broad-based adoption of on-demand applications.  In addition to integration being identified as the #1 barrier to SaaS adoption, there remains the question of how you centrally provision and remove users from a fragmented infrastructure that blends existing enterprise systems with one or more on-demand applications. 

I want my $2…

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

And that is all I am going to get from Bear Stearns as JP Morgan acquires them.  Now, I certainly didn’t lose anywhere near as much as Joseph Lewis although I am sure the size of his portfolio allocated to speculation is a tad larger than mine. 

Let’s hope the financial levers that can be thrown by the powers that be will be and in the right direction or this is going to get really ugly (uglier than it already is). 

Larry’s rules

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

We all get to decide how much like Larry Ellison we want to be but you cannot deny the success and related success of companies and people he has/had a hand in from Oracle to Netsuite to Saleforce to Tom Siebel.

A post on FoundRead sums up two of Larry’s rules the first relating to start-ups and the second related to work focus:

1.  Eat what you kill.  Or at least act like you killed it.

This is the other people’s money (OPM) trap and this hits at the core of treating the money you raise from others like it’s yours and that it may be all you get.

2.  Are you building it or selling it?

I like this one.  You do one of two things in a company – help build it or help sell it.  If you do something else, you won’t do it for long.

“Marketers are sales people. If they think of themselves as anything else, they’re not doing their job.”