There use to be a saying in the world of enterprise software vendors – "don't confuse sales with implementation."  Ah yes, those were the days when you could count on tasty perpetual software license revenue and systems integrators grew on the fat of the 8:1 ratio that existed between professional services fees and software license fees.  You had to spend that much more just to make the software work for you.  Hardly seems right…but that was reality.

Good times for vendors and SIs, not so much for customers.  Well, now the leverage shifts and the customer not only expects short time to value but demands it.  No more servers to configure, software to customize, legacy integrations to engineer….or are there?

The bar is high if you are aiming to be an on-demand enterprise (or just business) software company. There still is customized workflow (and always will be) and integration to legacy systems will never go away.  The trick is to orient your company around that fact that functionality is important but implementation gets the renewal…and in a SaaS world it's all about the renewal