Sunday, April 24, 2011

SaaS, Flexibility & Office Furniture

I learned something recently about software-as-a-service (SaaS) from a table.

This isn't just any table. This is a bivi table made by Turnstone, a division of Steelcase that specializes in office furniture for small, innovative organizations.

This table starts as a work surface. With an add-on "back pocket," it becomes a workstation. Drag two of them together and it's a shared work area. Push four into a group and it's a conference table.

As the good folks from Turnstone explained, it's all about flexibility. Their research shows that small, innovative organizations are trying different things all the time, which means they're constantly re-arranging their working relationships. When the relationships are re-arranged, the furniture needs to be re-arranged as well. Fixed cubicles or walls just don't suit fluid organizations.

SaaS offers this same kind of flexibility, in at least two ways.

The SaaS model gives vendors the ability to respond flexibly to customer requirements. Combining agile development with SaaS delivery, these companies can more quickly deliver product enhancements to all their customers.

Companies using SaaS gain the benefits of flexibility as well. They're not locked into expensive hardware and software that become obsolete over time. And they can flexibly scale their usage of the SaaS resources to fit their needs. There's no need to buy what's required for peak capacity and let it sit idle the rest of the time.

I've talked before about the hazards of selling SaaS on the advantages of price alone. Marketers have many more benefits and advantages to talk about than that: rapid deployment, remote access, regular enhancements, etc. Flexibility should be on that list too.


Creative Commons License

This work by Peter Cohen, SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Explaing SaaS and the Cloud on TV

Microsoft is running an ad on television that I think may be trying to demonstrate the value of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing.

It shows a mother who's having a problem composing a family photograph. To cut and paste different images into the photo, a la Photoshop, she appeals for help "to the cloud."

Huh?

You know the story of the blind men, each touching a different part of an elephant. One touches the leg and insists it's a tree. Another one touches the tail and claims it's a rope. A third one touches the elephant's trunk and is convinced it's a snake, and so on.

If we added the woman from the Microsoft "cloud" ad into this story, she'd be touching a discarded peanut shell that the elephant dropped a long way back on the trail. In other words, not even close.

It's sometimes difficult to explain SaaS and the cloud. One of the challenges confronting SaaS marketers is to educate all the buyers in the decision making process about this new mode of computing. Education is essential to winning the prospective customer's trust, and winning their trust is essential to winning their business.

In this effort to educate prospective buyers, the Microsoft "to the cloud"/photo-editing/discarded peanut shell TV ad doesn't really help. Sorry.

"It's bigger than the application"

A different ad running on television is actually more helpful to SaaS marketers... and it doesn't involve SaaS, the cloud, or even technology. It's from Starbucks.

The ad shows the process of creating a single cup of coffee for an individual customer, all the way from the plantation to the cup labeled with the customer's name, "Sue."


It closes with the tag-line: "You and Starbucks: It's bigger than coffee."

The message here: Starbucks is not just about the coffee. It's about the entire experience. They're marketing a relationship with the customer that goes beyond the product. In fact, they've even gone so far as to remove the word "coffee" from their logo.

That's a useful lesson for SaaS marketers. When it's done well, SaaS is marketed as more than just the application. It's about the entire customer experience: it's easy to purchase and deploy, simple to use, and painless to upgrade and maintain.

In addition to the features and functions, SaaS is about a commitment to deliver an increasingly useful solution reliably and securely over the life of the subscription.

It's bigger than the application.


Creative Commons License

This work by Peter Cohen, SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.