SaaS: if you really want it, don’t talk about it

Yesterday, I took part in a round table discussion organised by SaaS4Channel in the Netherlands. It’s a platform, established by PartnerPerformance, for industry peers to exchange views about Software as a Service and Cloud Computing. During the meeting questions were posed to stimulate discussion . How much of an enabler for specialisation in a specific segment is SaaS, and is specialisation needed to be successful? A wide cross section of the industry was represented, including a few suppliers who offer their solutions through the SaaS model and a number of ‘traditional’ advice organisations who mainly focus on optimising and digitising various business processes in the care sector. What became clear pretty quickly is that a client’s size has a real impact on both attitude and opportunity for change. A hospital is obviously a big client, not just in size but in the complexity of processes that must be automated. Small clients are, in my opinion, SMEs, with an emphasis on SE: companies with up to 50 employees.

SaaS and Cloud Computing are major issues in big companies, and not least because they can have important repercussions for existing IT departments. But they don’t really register with SMEs. Looking at our sector – our clients being entrepreneurs and accountants – I notice we hardly ever talk about SaaS or Cloud Computing. The main issues for us are digitising and optimising the processes surrounding accounts to realise savings and create possibilities for our practices to offer new services. But I also keep saying that the first companies to unconsciously embrace the SaaS delivery model are the SMEs. And this remains a slow process. Only 7% of all Dutch companies process their accounts online, so there’s a lot of opportunity for both entrepreneur and accountant.

This is all about standardising processes. But listening  to the stories about the big care institutions, trust me, it’s going to be 10 years before they start doing anything with SaaS. It’s an enormous technical challenge to migrate from legacy systems to a SaaS model. The company processes are terribly complex and haven’t been standardised at all, and at the moment it’s in no-one’s interest. It’s not in the interest of the advisory organisations of these institutions, nor of the care institutions themselves that have IT departments they can’t just push out of the door at the drop of a hat. 

So my conclusion following the round table discussion yesterday: if you really want SaaS, don’t talk about it. It’s a way of supplying functionality which is completely irrelevant for those ‘at the sharp end’. It’s a completely different way of thinking which starts with the supplier himself by explicitly not talking about it. Is verticalisation needed to be successful? No, but specialisation is. Twinfield specialises in the generic application online accounting. We have Twinapps software partners who integrate with our accounting systems online and realtime and take care of any possible verticalisation. You can compare it with Salesforce.com. A specialist in CRM with an Appexchange for which various software companies develop adjoining applications. Apple with AppStore, Google with Android Market. A completely different way of thinking, completely different business models, looking at things in a completely different way. So if a client begins to talk about SaaS of his own accord, run, because that only distracts from the issue at hand.

Author: Mark Davies, Country Manager Twinfield International United Kingdom