As direct example to my older post, we just confirmed a SaaS application to one of the largest Pharmaceutical companies in Australia. As you can imagine, security was the focal point and was paramount in getting the deal. Their initial hesitation was primarily around security, access controls and reliability (having servers located on the other side of the world can get a bit daunting to local companies). What swayed them in the end was the ability to demonstrate the security aspects and of course the cost/benefit analysis.

We are also in discussions with a number of Indian companies who seem to have no initial objections to SaaS. It seems (at this stage anyway) that uptake of SaaS may be easier to position in emerging economies then more mature, established ones. Too early to determine though.

Hi Nik,

Thanks for the insight about the Asia-Pacific region. Would love to hear more about an interesting success story where a company was initially hesitant, but is now thrilled with the switch to SaaS!

Also, that “local” hosting that you refer to is one of the points in the paper where some companies and categories (government, health care and military) need to keep the data within their corporate walls. SaaS is not right for all, but it seems that you can confirm that there is great need in many markets!

cheers,

craig.

Hi Justin,

Thanks for your thoughtful post. I agree and think that it takes confident people to be willing to transition from a successful business model to one that *could* be more successful. I hope that larger organizations have a strong executive sponsor who is willing to think outside the box.

I love your idea. Send me an email and let’s discuss a TZ case study.

cheers,

craig.

TemplateZone is among the minority of B2B companies shifting to SaaS for all of the reasons you have listed above (long sales period, different support channels, & accurate sales tracking). Though we feel that there are far more benefits to moving to the cloud once all the kinks have been worked out.

Transitioning from Desktop to SaaS is a tough road, where there were once larger license fees there are now smaller monthly payments. This can be daunting for companies, especially since they need to budget more in advertising and marketing for their new SaaS products. Although the large license fees are now gone, there is a trade off for the residual income that accrues over time. Ideally if you keep your churn rate low, you will be getting a large monthly residual that will top the sales you were once making with your one time license desktop applications. SaaS also saves us money on physical product development and product maintenance, which is a definite plus.

Other than the initial hit in sales (again moving from higher priced items to smaller monthly fees) I would say the next hardest part about SaaS is customer retention. In order to keep getting these monthly residuals you have to KEEP your customers. SaaS brings a renewed focus on customer service, which can be tough for small to medium sized businesses who are working through this transition. This fear of losing users, in my opinion, is mirrored in the hesitation of B2B (and B2C) companies to actually get on social media. Both SaaS and Social Media require a proactive approach by businesses, that most are not quite ready to allocate time to just yet.

Overall I am glad we decided to go SaaS and am sure in the near future we will never need to look back at desktop applications.

You should do a case study blog post about different companies moving to a SaaS model, especially in the B2B space, I think that would be a great supplement to today’s post.