Free SaaS
incubator, plus tips on SaaS, SEM, and selling
by Gordon
Graham, Editor, SoftwareCEO
Getting ready to go SaaS?
Want to show off your beta offering at low risk
to prospects and investors? Check out the new
SaaS Incubator; you could get six months' free
help from a leader in SaaS enablement.
And don't miss the two
keys to moving to SaaS, from the CEO of the
fastest-growing company in this space.
Want to boost your firm's
search engine results, but not sure where to
start? This 550-page book is a complete workshop
on how to analyze where your site is, set goals
for improvement, and execute a successful search
marketing campaign.
If you've been banging on
corporate doors without getting in, here's a new
book on selling to big companies. Some timely
advice: Don't waste your time at networking
events, or trot out your elevator speech;
instead, beef up your value proposition.
Free SaaS incubator to
get your offering to market.
Here's a nice gift from OpSource, just in time for the holidays:
six months' free help rolling out your new
software as a service (SaaS) offering.
The company, which now
provides infrastructure for 40 firms, created
its "SaaS Incubator" to help ISVs get over the
hump of bringing a beta offering to market.
From the incubator, ISVs
can immediately begin delivering beta versions
of on-demand solutions, with no upfront
investment in infrastructure. That means you can
sign up users, and show off your beta to
potential investors, at next to no risk.
To qualify, you need a
beta application that runs under Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Red Hat Enterpriser Linux, and less than $1 million in
annual revenue. ISVs can apply here.
Every successful applicant
will get six months' free services from OpSource,
including:
- SaaS application
hosting,
- guaranteed uptime,
- system monitoring,
and
- 24/7 technical
support.
OpSource CEO Treb Ryan
estimates that this bundle is worth up to $2,000
a month.
"Whether you're a
traditional software company looking to get into
this space, or some guy sitting at home trying
to figure out the next great product to create,
it's difficult to get a new application up and
rolling in this space," he says.
"We're removing the
financial hurdles and enabling software
companies to prove the benefits of SaaS in a
secure, risk-free environment."
It sounds like an
excellent idea to us, from one of the leading
firms in the SaaS enablement marketplace. Two
ISVs have already signed up.
"OpSource's SaaS Incubator
is critical to the scalability and reliability
of our application," says Joe Bransom, president
of Citizen Image, which is scheduled to
launch in late January 2006.
Citizen Image will offer
an online marketplace linking amateur
photographers with news media and creative
agencies, so that people can sell or give away,
for example, photos of newsworthy events such as
hurricanes.
"The volume of digital
images that photographers can contribute is
completely unpredictable, and OpSource will
enable us to meet the market's demand without a
hitch," says Bransom.
"In addition, we've
eliminated a major capital expenditure. OpSource
has given us the ability to invest our seed
funding in areas that will grow our business,
such as marketing and sales."
While Bransom's firm has
an online community feel, the other company
already in the incubator offers business
planning tools, which some customers wanted to
access on demand.
"The OpSource SaaS
Incubator was a perfect fit for us," says Kylon
Guston, VP of sales for Business Resource Software, which sells
strategic planning tools.
"It gives us a chance to
work through the development and deployment
issues as we ramp up our customer base, and
offers a very stable platform that will perform
well for our users," he says.
"When we are ready to go
live with a full production version, the
OpSource team will fully understand our
application and operations."
Two keys to success
with SaaS
OpSource's Ryan has two observations drawn from
his very busy year, during which his company
grew so fast it was named Rising Star #5 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list for
2005.
"There are two things we
see that really tend to drive people quicker out
of the gate," he says. New ventures in SaaS will
be wise to follow these tips.
SaaS success key #1:
Price your software based on your customer's
success.
In other words, plan to get paid when your
customers get paid.
"Companies tend to be more
willing to pay people if they're making more
money," says Ryan, with a chuckle.
"One of the mistakes
people make is they try to figure out the proxy
for 'how much are they using my software?' What
they should really be figuring out is 'how
successful is my software making them?'
"The closer you can get to
that, the better chance you're going to have."
OpSource eats its own dog
food in this regard, with a pricing policy
linked to their customer's success in selling
SaaS subscriptions.
"Our model is, 'Hey,
what's your model? We'll match it.'," says Ryan.
"It really doesn't make sense to switch to SaaS
and then have it stop with us. This pricing is
going through us, to the underlying technology,
and I really believe that it will go through the
whole value chain."
This is what makes SaaS so
refreshing: How many software vendors have ever
said, 'Hey, we'll share in your success. We
won't get paid until our software proves
itself.'
In fact, that's one of
pain points propelling the adoption of SaaS:
Business buyers were tired of gambling big bucks
on software that might never return any value to
their firms. With SaaS, all they gamble is a
small monthly fee, with no headaches about
installing or upgrading the application.
Understanding this reality
is essential for anyone getting into SaaS.
SaaS success key #2:
Offer new wine in the new bottle; do something
that couldn't be done before.
Citizen Image is an example of this, and Ryan
has lots more from among his customer base.
"The people with the most
success are not just taking traditional
enterprise software and saying, 'Now it's SaaS,
please buy it.' They're offering a complete
package, or at least new features on a
traditional package," he says.
"In the end, this is still
about making great software. But it's a lot
better if you're doing something they can't get
anywhere else, something that just couldn't be
done before."
"And that allows you to
attack the market in a much more interesting
way."
He points to his customer Platte River Systems,
which does sales pipeline tracking for chip
manufacturers.
"Their customers have chip
designers in the States in one company, another
company that's manufacturing in Asia, and a
third company selling in Europe. Finding
traditional software that would manage all that
would be very difficult."
Platte River Systems
brings it all together with their
vertical-market SaaS offering.
"What they do is
interconnect everything, so that partners and
manufacturers and channels can all access the
same system over the net," says Ryan.
"They're able to take a
traditional solution, and offer a capability
that couldn't be done before people had adopted
software as a service."
print-friendly pdf version  |
