SaaS Opinions - Recently Updated Pages

Opinion: The Financial SaaS Manifesto Part 2

dahowlett — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 07:31:05 CDT

This from Stefan Topfer:
your name: Paul Druckman

your email: paul.druckman@gmail.com

subject: Feedback

comment: I have been using your system for the first time over the past few months
for a new organisation I have set up with colleagues.

I am pleased with the accounting system in its basic form as it does all that I need
and very effectively. I have also been highly impressed with not only the immediate
response to queries over the support "chat", but in addition the reponsiveness to
problems being chased up afterwards.

I am a Past President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and am happy for my
positive comments to be used in your publicity if that helps.

Kind regards

Opinion: The Financial Software as a Service Manifesto

david_terrar — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 04:06:23 CDT

What is Software as a Service?
Traditionally companies buy, licence or build the software that they need and install it on their own computers and networks. They manage both the business process and the technology that supports it themselves. We call this On-Premise software. Typically On-Premise software is licensed at the start of a project with an on-going maintenance fee for support and new releases.

The SaaS approach is different. The customer is responsible for the business process, but the provider is responsible for the technology and its support. The application runs at the provider's facility and is based on a common set of code and data definitions consumed by customers in a one-to-many model. This is often termed 'muliti-tenancy' and refers to the fact that the provider makes the code available for consumption in a single instance to multiple clients. The service is usually paid for on an inclusive subscription basis and most providers let their customers discontinue at a month's notice. This means that retaining customers requires a laser focus on service.

Why should it be important to the financial management community?
SaaS provides an alternate model for delivering business processes. The most important difference is that a SaaS approach can help the customer or practice collaborate with staff, business partners and clients in ways that would be difficult or impossible with the On-Premise approach. Partners can have controlled access to a customer's system. Practices can easily share data with their clients, or analyse their entire client base to provide additional services, where the analysis would be very difficult across multiple physical locations or instances of the software.

What benefits can SaaS offer?

Implementation is generally much quicker than On-Premise and training costs are often lower because training occurs much closer to the point of service delivery.
The software never requires customer maintenance. That is the service provider's responsibility. All bug fixes, patches and new features simply 'turn up.' This avoids the many problems associated with On-Premise updates.
The one-to-many architecture allows some economies of scale and cost savings to be shared amongst the community of users. In addition the management of the IT environment is changed so that the SaaS customer only needs to support a basic, Internet connected device with a web browser. That means so-called legacy PCs can have a much longer useful life.
The versioning issues associated with exchanging data files and worrying about software versions disappears.
In addition, the practice or the client can now consider outsourcing some of the routine transaction recording work to lower cost locations.

What are the risks and concerns?
Some people have expressed concerns over data security and the risk of service outtages. Most SaaS providers will offer similar access security to Internet banking, and a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which guarantees a better than 99% availability. A provider's backup and recovery strategy is usually much more comprehensive compared to that applied in on-premise scenarios. Overall, this should mean the risks associated with software are reduced. There are similar risks and concerns over the long term viability of the vendor compared to a traditional software company, but most providers allow easy access to data for import and export. Provider switching is therefore much easier than with On-Premise providers.

What should you look for from a potential SaaS partner?

Check that functionality matches your needs. Most SaaS providers are in 'early stage' development and do not offer all the bells and whistles found in other applications. But then they don't have the bloat that goes with it.
Review the track record and reference sites. It can take 2 to 3 years to establish a stable SaaS business.
Look for a "try before you buy" option. A good SaaS provider should have no fear of giving you a test run to check things out before you sign up.
Check online performance. SaaS providers architect solutions for the web rather than retrofit. There is a palpable difference.
Look for configurability. There should be options to configure your user environment for your particular business.
Look for comprehensive service delivery. This should handle easy set up of new users, new companies, and configuration of user access for different levels of user.
Review online help options, and an automated approach to tracking helpdesk issues. Obtain a copy of the SLA which should guarantee 99+% availability?
Finally, look for open APIs that make it easy for you to import and export data and connect the provider's web service to other services. The better SaaS providers realise that integration of different services is one of SaaS's key advantages.

Is SaaS right for you?
The rise of vendors like Winweb (118,000 users), Twinfield (25,000 users), Liberty Accounts and FreshBooks (135,000) users, all in the SMB space provides a strong leading indicator that SaaS has demonstrated value and fitness in the market. Salesforce.com, used by many SMBs for CRM, has achieved success with enterprises implementing thousands of users. Whether SaaS is right for your business is another matter.

In follow on articles we will extend the manifesto to discuss customer use cases from various SaaS vendors. As well as explaining how they are using their particular web service, we'll be highlighting the key reasons why they chose this approach over a conventional, on-premise solution.

For further reading, here are links to useful articles that give more detail and background on the SaaS topic:

From Nigel Harris of AccountingWEB:

Online accounting services buyer's guide

From Phil Wainewright of ZDnet:

SoSaaS: Same old Software, as a Service

Seeking the true meaning of SaaS

What to look for in a SaaS vendor

In SaaS, does trust depend on purity?

From Frederick Chong, Gianpaolo Carraro, and Roger Wolter of Microsoft:

Multi-Tenant Data Architecture

From Jim Holincheck of Gartner:

Clearing Up the Confusion About SaaS

Home

david_terrar — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 06:55:02 CST

About SaaS Opinions
This wiki has been set up as an experiment, initially intended to produce an "Opinion piece" for AccountingWEB. As well as getting a group of SaaS evangelists to collaborate on an article, AW will use this as a case study on use of wiki technology for collaboration. It might be that we'll use this area to collaborate on similar material in the future.

The article and comments that inspired this:
Opinion: Don't be frightened of software as a service. By Mark Holland

How to use this wiki:
In general use wiki pages for content that we are developing, or major static items such as John's guidelines for the article. Only use comments if we need a conversation around issues associated with the content. The help pages and videos accessed above and to the right will show you how to find your way around Wetpaint, but it is reasonably intuitive. (DT)

Editorial guidelines:

Title = The Financial Software as a Service Manifesto

That's my suggested headline - but feel free to change it. Further to my comments on the Aweb discussion, the SaaS evangelists have expended many thousands of words on our site on the subject and to be frank, I am beginning to view the debate a little like medieval theologists arguing about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

One gripe I would have with blog-driven conversations is that they operate like mind maps, leading you off into all kinds of tributaries and diversions. they are not good at distilling knowledge and insight down into logical, easily digested formats that get the message across more powerfully. In this way, a well structured article is pretty much like a piece of computer code that programs the reader to think and behave in a certain way.

This is your mission - deliver me 500 words or so in an agreed, signed statement that tells accountants :

what SaaS is
why it should be important to the financial management community
the benefits it can confer
the risks (perceived and real) it may involve and why they should not be frightened of it
what they should look for from a potential SaaS partner

(You can go up to more, if you need it, but the more verbiage, the less clear your argument will be, I suspect. If required, I am happy to run a series of articles on the topic - as typing the brief, I have already expanded the envelope a little)

I'm interested to hear Dennis' latest stance, which I take as a bit of a wake-up to the debate. It gels with my attitude that focusing on the tech is an age-old mistake. Experience suggests that the accounting software market has become very brand-driven and I don't see SaaS putting a dent in that yet. (JS)

Title = The Financial Software as a Service Manifesto part 2 (or Manifesto II: The Sequel)

JS to add guidance/mission for Part 2 here.

SaaS Evangelists - start here
I've followed John's brief as described above, and added a first draft "Aunt Sally" article on the page "Opinion: The Financial Software as a Service Manifesto". This is just a starting point that we can adapt or tear to shreds and re-write. Dennis has added his view on another page. We should try and combine his view as an indication of the way the market is heading. Please join in and suggest changes, either by changing the page directly, or by adding in page comments so we can have some dialogue over the suggestions. Create additional pages as you see fit if you think that will help the process. Thanks for joining in. (DT)

Useful SaaS links and articles

david_terrar — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 04:05:38 CST

From Phil Wainewright:

SoSaaS: Same old Software, as a Service

Seeking the true meaning of SaaS

What to look for in a SaaS vendor

In SaaS, does trust depend on purity?

From Frederick Chong, Gianpaolo Carraro, and Roger Wolter:

Multi-Tenant Data Architecture

From Jim Holincheck:

Clearing Up the Confusion About SaaS

From Nigel Harris:

Online accounting services buyer's guide

DAH 2 penn'orth

dahowlett — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 08:08:16 CST

When I think about how the market has moved in the last 6-9 months, the emphasis is shifting to the service element. One way that is being expressed is through the current debate around XAPL. While I'm not convinced end users care less about the technical aspects, a recent article by Sarah Perrin in AccountancyAge pointed up the divide that exists among professional software vendors. On the one hand you have Digita's MD Jerry Rihill quoted as being gung-ho, while IRIS CEO Martin Leuw was apparently 'standoff-ish.'

Service in this context means 'shared data.' XAPL provides a way to make this happen, very much like BASDAs eBIS-XML industry initiative of the early 2000's. The difference is that if Companies House and HMRC push it, then it will happen. The real adoption push needs to come from practitioners who understand the value of sharing data. So for example if I'm preparing a Winforecast projection then I may well want to access industry data from Companies House, supplement that with local data (if available) from HMRC trading benchmark data and GoogleMaps to assess competition. From the accounting side, I will want to spit out XML data (could be XAPL compliant) from the accounts package and/or the accounts production system for comparative and background purposes. These data can then be assembled in a spreadsheet enabled wiki (for example) to start building out a practice template for assessing investment or new business opportunities. Once inside the wiki, that template can be re-used for other projects, shared among anyone interested and communicated to the client in real-time. It will be event driven. This will massively collapse time to decision and so provide the smart user with a significant edge in say an auction environment where an asset purchase is under way.

While this may sound like Fairyland, the reality is that smart 3rd party vendors like Teqlo are working hard to expose these services as drag and drop components into an assembly palette. We're maybe 6 months away from seeing business class services of the kind I describe but they will come. Vendors who fail to recognise the potential and value of this kind of co-opetition will be left in the dust as smart vendors assemble services for re-distribution among their communities of interest. Smart practitioners will be all over these services because they add so much client value. I'd go so far to suggest that practitioners may even be preapred to toss out incumbent suppliers in order to get these shiny new toys.

The real shock to the system will come in cost. These assembly services will not cost hundreds or thousands of pounds but be $5-30 a pop per user. Price will not be a barrier. The potential for value delivery - huge.

Saas is dead, long live services.

I provided a specific perspective on this topic at AccMan.