Businessweek recently published a surprisingly negative article about SaaS, saying that its hype can be largely undeserved for a number of reasons. Now, I like BS-calling as much as the next guy (maybe a bit more, actually), but I found Gene Marks’s reasoning to be too generalized and all-encompassing.
Marks says:
Myth 1: SaaS is cheaper. No, it’s not. In fact, it can be a lot more expensive. Most service providers charge each user by the month. If you’ve got 10 people using a product, and they’re costing you 50 bucks a person each a month, that’s $6,000 a year. Most in-house systems have one-time licensing fees and optional support agreements. Spreading out the payments is nothing new, either; tons of software leasing companies will finance your purchase and spread out monthly payments over time. When you look at SaaS over the long term, it’s usually not a cheaper option.
Considering that on-premise enterprise software for a large firm can easily run into the millions just for new license acquisition, this argument pales quickly. And support (maintenance) agreements for such systems are not “optional” — they’re mandatory. Seeing how I’ve seen annual maintenance bills upwards of $400K/year, we’re not talking spare change, either.
And really — let’s not get into the costs associated with new hardware investments or modifications to existing infrastructure. Let’s not get into new servers, new application security policies, network provisioning, desktop client modifications, and permissions. Let’s not get into end-user performance issues and the time and expense needed to troubleshoot and remedy them. And let’s also not get into aggregate IT staff allocations on a man-hour basis, because the numbers get crazy quickly. Suffice to say that all of these get figured into the equation when trying to calculate the TCO of on-premise enterprise software.
SaaS may not be cheap, but it certainly might be cheaper. And there is value in having fewer on-premise headaches with trashed servers, corrupt databases, and angry end users that the internal helpdesk must deal with. It becomes an intangible quality-of-life discussion for the enterprise.
In our recent newsletter, two of our senior principal consultants wrote a quick bit about the differences in PeopleSoft invoice matching functionality from 8.9 to 9.0. We get asked about this a lot, and for most users, the differences can be somewhat arcane. Because of this, I’d like to share the article.
Differences in PeopleSoft Invoice Matching from 8.9 to 9.0: A High-level View
by April Black and Jack Kochie, Sr. Principal Consultants
From PeopleSoft 8.9 to 9.0, some of the invoice matching and processing rules changed significantly, and we find many of our clients don’t know about the changes in any sort of detail. At a high-level, here are the biggest-hitting changes:
9.0 includes all features of prior releases
Expanded document association included (e.g. receipt selection)
Expanded rules engine (contexts: summary, tolerance, global), which provide:
More flexibility
Flow control (allows matching – i.e. check all or check first)
Summary rules
Rule tolerances
Auto-matching with debit memos
Configurable matching workbench
Expanded workflow
As for what we get asked about steadily, it’s the intricacies of the rules engine.
Every Friday from here on out I’m going to delve into something more conversational simply because I want to. This Friday, here and now, is all about a productivity tip from Merlin Mann over at 43folders that I find very valuable, simply because I have a zillion things on my plate and keeping sight of what each of them is really driving to sometimes gets difficult.
Mann basically says to take what we’re thinking about doing, and re-phrase it into a more actionable what and why format:
Think about the thing that’s most on your mind right now. It’s probably not the thing you think is most on your mind; the stuff that’s really getting our attention likes to run behind the refrigerator whenever we turn the lights on. But, anyway. Got it? Okay.
Let’s say you now have in your mind something that needs to be different than how it currently is. For me it’s:
Slides for talk in Arizona
If I re-articulate that in the following format:
I need to $FOO because I want to $BAR
I get something like this:
I need to spend an hour cleaning up my Keynote slides because I want to give a great talk on Inbox Zero next Friday.
Now I’ve said something I can use; I have a Next Action (reviewing and editing my slides for 60 minutes) and a Project (presenting a kickass talk in Scottsdale).
This is Outcome-Based Thinking 101, but I think it can be a powerful way to focus when you’re feeling adrift about what to do with a something.
Give it a try, forcing yourself to sketch more than the shadows of anxiety, priority, or resignation. Envision what this would look like if you really kicked ass, then figure out the next physical action that gets your kicking foot into motion.
Try it. It seriously cuts away the stuff you’d normally do when diving into a task and helps you get right to the heart of the matter.
One of my favorite new business blogs is Deal Architect by Vinnie Mirchandani. It’s become a daily read for me. But here’s the thing: I follow over 100 feeds. I don’t go to any website regularly, even personal favorites like Daring Fireball or kottke.org. I live my digital life, in large part, in a feed reader (Google Reader for me, but there are many of them out there), and clicking away to a website — especially for the sake of clicking and little else — is a total interrupt to my workflow.
So Vinnie, if you’re reading that, can you please switch to full RSS feeds? Your subscribers will thank you.
Internally, we’ve talked about doing videos of things ranging from the instructional to the campy. Check out what our partner Workday did with their American Idol spoof, below. The editing is actually very good.
Dave Duffield is a master of culture-building, among many other things. Good to see the PeopleSoft-in-its-glory energy resurfacing here.
Dell, in a brilliant display of PR savvy, has tried to trademark “cloud computing”. Per The Standard:
After witnessing countless corporate attempts to patent common practices or trademark common terms, and seeing the resulting PR fallout, one would think that companies would just stop trying. Dell, however, seems to think that it should be able to trademark the term “cloud computing,” a phrase that entered the tech lexicon many years ago to describe software processing that takes place on a distributed network, such as the Internet.
This is a ridiculous attempt to trademark a colloquialism and obviously should be killed.
In fact, Owen Smigelski, a trademark attorney commenting on on The Standard’s article, explains the trademark’s process and likely fate:
I’m a trademark attorney, and Dell has done more than just “try” to use the trademark. The application was published for opposition, no one lodged any complaints, and now the trademark will proceed to registration (once Dell submits examples of its trademark use). The mark can later be disputed once it is registered by anyone who believes they will be harmed by the registration of the trademark by Dell. Examining Attorneys at the USPTO usually catch phrases that are generally used by the public, thus I am surprised they let this one through with approval.
Quite a bit, actually. This is one that you should look at deeper than the headline.
Last week, Appirio announced that it bagged Series B funding upwards of $5M by Sequoia Capital. It’s worth noting that Sequoia is the same firm that underwrote upstarts such as Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and PayPal. The pedigree is Midas-esque in its strength.
Many analysts and trade pub reporters have questioned whether there is a role for consulting and professional services in the SaaS market. There is no question that traditional professional services firms such as Accenture and CAP Gemini are still searching for the right way to scale down their methodologies and costs to fit the on-demand services market. However, Appirio’s revenues have grown more than 400% in the last three months, during which over 1500 customers in 80 countries have adopted its on-demand solutions.
In other words, the SaaS consulting market, as a market differentiated from blue-chip ERP/enterprise IT consulting, has been financially validated. This isn’t “so-and-so customer chooses so-and-so SaaS vendor, so check out how SaaS is maturing.” This is an order of magnitude stronger than win stories or market buzz: this is $5M of real dollar validation by an investment firm that has a history of picking winners.
Here at MiPro, we continually are trying to refine our methodologies, delivery timetables and cost structures for our on-demand (Workday, Authoria) clients. We know the SaaS market is a different animal entirely than, say, our mainline PeopleSoft ERP practice. On the macro level, it’s good to see the validation Kaplan suggests from a broader market vitality perspective. In a more subtle level, it makes me proud that we are working in the exact same direction as some of the biggest names in SaaS/on-demand consulting. Cool stuff.
If you take this blog’s RSS feed and drop it into Wordle, you get a neat word cloud composed of oft-used words found in the feed’s RSS data. The cloud for Unfiltered looks like this (click to enlarge):
Nice idea for a web app, and good design aspects too.
All you need for Wordle to work is a bunch of straight text or a RSS or ATOM feed from a website or blog. That’s it. More fun than you might imagine.
Eppendorf develops products and systems for use in life-science laboratories worldwide. By any measure, you’d think this is not the sort of company that would have serious marketing chops.
But you’d be wrong.
For its latest product, Eppendorf spent significant money on a viral video that is doing exactly what it was designed to do — make its rounds via word-of-mouth and the social web. It’s linked everywhere right now, and this post just adds one more node to the pile.
Here you have a company that sells and messages to a scientific community Purple Cowing something so remarkably well that it’s a perfect illustration of how you can really get a product/company/service name to spread. It’s cheesy and campy, and that’s what people love about it. No brochure, web page, or whitepaper could ever cast such a wide net.
I don’t know what epMotion is, but that’s not really the point. The name is out there en masse.
Just because you work in what’s perceived to be a dry or conservative industry doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun.
