Here are five areas to cover to deliver the right message to fellow executives and board members about software as a service.

You've made countless presentations during your career, but there's something about this one that has you particularly anxious. The CEO asked you to put together a presentation for the board about the company's software-as-a-service strategy and "the cloud."

The request nags. Why now? What have they been reading? What do they want to know? And what do they know that I don't?

Valuable Blog post from Visual Website Optimizer:

We are in the process of finalizing pricing for my startup Visual Website Optimizer, which is an A/B and Multivariate testing tool. As you can imagine, fixing price is one of the toughest decisions that a startup has to (inevitably) take. Once fixed, it could be extremely difficult to change it without annoying a lot of customers. We want to be extra sure that we don’t end up under- or over-pricing Visual Website Optimizer. So, how do we decide what to charge?

Asking beta users can be one of the strategies and we actually used that for VWO. However, it turned out to be not the best of our ideas because users actually correlate price with quality. Further, if a product is innovative (like VWO is), users aren’t able to rationally determine its price as they would do in established markets (read this research paper [PDF]). Hence, asking users what a new product should cost yields half-baked information as they have little or no reference points to determine the ideal price.

SaaS: Software As A Service has become widely accepted and is a popular choice among businesses. Businesses consuming SaaS applications favour the low upfront cost and zero infrastructure headaches. Also, SaaS applications being deployed online have the advantage of being available anywhere, anytime and even on any platform. Businesses developing software have embraced the SaaS model with open hands. The emergence of Cloud computing, subscription ready payment gateways and success stories of the likes of SalesForce and Google Apps makes it an easy model to follow.

Clearly SaaS applications have adopted a different pricing model than the traditional one-time license fee based desktop or web applications. There is a definite recurring cost per user in the hosted model that warrants the need for a different pricing approach. You not only provide an app but also manage users data.

 

Glik's, an apparel retailer, has selected the Epicor Retail Software as a Service solution to provide its Midwest retail locations with software and hosting infrastructure and services to help drive improved efficiencies and processes throughout its retail operations.

Officials with Epicor said that the Retail SaaS solution, which delivers the company’s acclaimed and integrated store, merchandising, planning, audit & operations management and CRM modules, was selected by Glik's to support the ongoing expansion, which averages four to six new store openings each year.

If you are planning to invest and introduce a new Recruitment Process Automation system, it is not uncommon for you to get hassled about comparing features, advantages, quality, benefits, and prices. Immaterial of selection, your new software will play a major role in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and your Return on Investment (ROI).

How would you decide on the best recruitment software solution for your organization? In this article we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of two renowned software deployment methods, which will assist you in taking the right decision on this critical subject.

Self-hosting Software Deployment:

Article written by Quentin Gallivan @ PivotLink

Software as a Service (SaaS) BI adoption is undergoing a sea-change. Industry-watchers expect implementations to grow steadily in the coming year, as businesses seek to deploy intuitive BI tools and applications cost-effectively to more users, reduce time to value and time to scale, and lower capital expenditures. In many respects, these are historic times for BI.

Amid the tumult and noise, it’s important to understand the context for SaaS BI adoption, and why it has rapidly become a viable solution for businesses in a variety of industries. Here are five developing trends that promise to fuel the growth of SaaS BI.

 1. SaaS BI implementations will grow at a faster rate than on-premise BI.

The era of high-risk, complex, and time-consuming BI implementations may be finally coming to an end.  It is rapidly being replaced by a new era that demands quick BI wins defined by specific business use-cases. Time to value is imperative in the new era of BI. Projects must be implemented in days, not months or years, and provide an immediate return to the business user.

SaaS BI is experiencing an uptick in investment, market visibility, and user adoption. Basic reporting and analysis have become a commodity, so there is little reason for any customer or business to invest in on-premise capabilities with the price/performance ratio that SaaS vendors offer.

We will see on-premise BI vendors’ revenue streams shrink as the SaaS BI value proposition goes mainstream. Successful SaaS BI vendors will be those whose offerings were designed to scale within cloud-computing architectures, and whose marginal cost per additional user approaches zero.

In addition, SaaS BI has developed into a superlative and affordable augmentation strategy for legacy BI implementations. By enabling IT to better support business with highly-secure, easy-to-use tools, and right-time data, SaaS BI will be viewed as the best tool for high value, quick BI wins at an affordable cost.

SaaS software is much more dependent on being run by the numbers than conventional on-premises software because the expenses are front loaded and the costs are back loaded.  SAP learned this the hard way with its Business By Design product, for example.  If you run the numbers, there is a high degree of correlation between low-cost of delivering the service and high growth rates among public SaaS companies.  It isn’t hard to understand–every dollar spent delivering the service is a dollar that can’t be spent to find new customers or improve the service.

So how do you lower your cost to deliver a SaaS service?

Read the whole article here...