Recently in saas Category

The first SAAS vendor I remember seeing at Channel Partners was nGenX, a subsidiary  of Lightwave Group. nGenX was offering Microsoft Office on-demand as a white label product for agents to sell for commission.

Next up for agents and VARs is GreenAppx.

With branded SaaS marketplaces, telecom agents and VARs can help small to mid-size customers eliminate capital expenditures and licensing agreements. SMBs can access critical business applications such as Microsoft Hosted Exchange Server, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, GoodLink Mobile Email, McAfee Security, WebEx Conferencing, and IBM Data Back Up and Recovery. In addition to hosting and network infrastructure, GreenAppX manages all transactions, application licensing, and software updates.[thomasnet]

Lots of ways to add streams of income to your traditional telecom catalog. More agents should be selling data storage/back-up/email archiving, it's like AFLAC for your business.

It is getting tough out there, as the news keeps repeating as nauseum.
Businesses are laying off and closing. If you can maneuver in this environment, then opportunity awaits. No I haven't been drinking. Let's examine things.

Layoffs means companies have to be more efficient and more productive with less. What does that mean? Technology needs to be applied and work.

Budgets for travel are slashed, but people still have to connect/communicate.

Legislation is in place forcing IT teams to work harder.

The message is that Unified Communications can save you. So can Tele-Presence, Video/web/audio conferencing, hosted email, SAAS, VoIP/Hosted PBX, and that over-used term "managed services".

If the IT staff is short handed, but still has to do data storage, email archiving, and other DR/BC and regulatory processes - it can be outsourced.
And you can sell it. Gartner just did a paper on Hosted Email which spells out the Return on investment for using Hosted email. IBM Lotus, Microsoft Office, and Google Apps are looking for VAR's.  What's a VAR? An agent that stepped up.

At a VAR Kick-Off meeting, Cisco emphasized touching the customer. The box got them into the client with switch and router sales. Now the trick is to upsell the out-dated boxes and to add security modules to as many sales as possible. That's the Upsell. After security, comes VoIP and Collaboration (Webex, Web 2.0, UC). Cisco has designed the sales road map for its VAR Channel.

Do you have a road map, sales flow chart or other process in place to help your agents move from selling transactional services like DSL, cell phones, POTS, PRI, Integrated T1 to complex sales like Hosted PBX, Metro Ethernet, and Managed Services like firewall, backup, intrusion detection, DDOS Defense and SAAS. Remember, SAAS is the bucket that Hosted PBX, Secure Email, and Hosted Exchange fall in.

To become a rainmaker, you must make a fundamental shift in thinking from:
"How can I close this sale?" to "How can I create a relationship that will benefit the customer and my company in the long run?" 

There is a lot of buzz about recasting and renewing. Should agents be paid?
Should carriers grab that renewal?  This would not be an issue at all if you owned the relationship with the customer. By owned I mean that you are providing the client with enough added value that he wouldn't want to go direct to the carrier. I always explained it that I was the Outsourced Telecom Provisioning department. I am the go-to guy for any questions about telecom (and by extension IT). Don't you want to be in that position?

AT&T bought USi in Oct. 2006. My friend Jack sent me an email from ATT Wholesale:

With AT&T's Payroll Services, powered by USinternetworking (USi), an AT&T Company, your payroll management headaches are history! You still keep control with full access and visibility, but we handle the tough jobs for you. Our know-how and tools will save you time, reduce your risk of errors and keep dollars in your pocket.

Would you let the folks that can't get your phone bill correct handle your payroll and payroll taxes?!

After thought: why is this ATT WHOLESALE?

Network World has a story about how an online storage site, Linkup, formerly known as MediaMax, shut down this week after 45% of the data was lost. Who's fault is it? Well, the article tries to figure that out.

As we have seen, outages are everywhere - Amazon, Google, etc. Five Nines is difficult especially now. My thoughts are that there are more hackers worldwide with broadband. More compromised machines. Less security precautions. Buggy, bloated software that goes unpatched. Less common sense.

All these free services have a cost to deliver. If they don't have a revenue model that is working (like Google or Amazon), then how can they afford to provide secure services to you for free? As we have seen, even GOOG and AMAZ who not only can afford it, hire top notch talent to manage it have issues that cannot be avoided. Power outages. Broken parts. Redundant failures. As any data center tech can tell you, these things happen.

A CLEC client called today with a DS3 card outage on his class 5 switch - and the redundant switch-over wouldn't work. What can you do?

Plan for the worst. Test. Communicate with your customers in the case of an event.

In a recent column in PC Mag, An Ode to Shrink Wrapped Software, John Dvorak talks about the ten weaknesses of online apps. It really comes down to this: "Using the Internet to return to the old model of mainframe computing is a misuse of resources and a dead end."

Everything else he says just comes back to either the model sucks or the security / reliability stinks. His argument is really about Control. He makes it sound like when you buy the latest version of Microsoft anything, you own it or have any control over it. It has as many security flaws as using an open, unsecured PC at an Internet cafe and leaving it for a potty break.

Microsft launches Equipt: "The Microsoft Equipt bundle -- formerly code-named "Albany" -- includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, plus OneCare and a handful of existing free Windows Live applications." [AP] Microsoft has already entered the SAAS market space with Hosted Office (for business). Now it enters the consumer market.

I wonder how much of this is a function of all the online apps (like Google Apps, ThinkFree, GE Whiteboard, etc.) coupled with a growing piracy problem. Let's face it, Gen Y doesn't like buying anything - music, movies, software. (They think it should all be free, unless of course, they wrote it - then that's a different story). There is a perception that shrink wrapped software sales are dying. Even Intuit has moved to an SAAS model (or Monthly Recurring Charge (MRC) model) with QuickBooks Online. Add in that there is a (very slow) migration to a smartphone (like the iPhone, Blackberry, and Nokia) replacing a laptop in certain situations. Online apps become more efficient, like Hosted Exchange service. It just makes more sense with a mobile, always-on business segment.

I have one more observation on Microsoft launching Equipt. Vista was not the typical success for Redmond. Petitions abound to keep XP around, because many don't want the pain of upgrading to another bloated and unstable Microsoft O/S. Vista's launch was a perfect time for folks to switch to Apple. If you had to learn a new O/S, it might as well be the cooler one. Now Redmond has to re-invent itself to keep the money machine going. Microsoft used to be able to squash or buy its competitors to maintain its monopoly hold, but those days are gone.

You look at all the markets that Microsoft is in: web O/S, mobile O/S, office apps, IPTV, IE, search, MSN, IM and desktop. It really only holds mindshare in the desktop and office apps space. Open source software like Apache, Simbian, Firefox, Thunderbird, Zimbra, OpenOffice, and others have taken a bite out of its dominance. IPTV and search just aren't working. The mobile O/S is behind Nokia, Apple and Blackberry worldwide.

Gates is leaving at a time when the company will have to re-think the market spaces that it competes in. Microsoft has to Re-Invent itself. (Balmer call Tom Peters and Seth Godin for some ideas).

Why North American Enterprises Aren't Interested in SaaS (according to Networld World mag)

According to a Forrester Research survey, these are the top 8 reasons why companies say "No Thanks" to SaaS.

Percent Reason

• 66% Integration issues
• 61% Total cost of ownership concerns
• 55% Lack of customization
• 50% Security concerns
• 42% "We can't find the specific application we need"
• 39% Complicated pricing models
• 39% Application performance
• 34% "We're locked in with our current vendor"

The security concerns and pricing models are the only thing in the hands of the people selling SAAS. Over at InfoWeek, there's an article about what people who use SAAS like. About 70% of business tech professionals were satisfied with the Software-as-a-service that they were using. That's a pretty high number.

So if it is matched up well -- needs with the proper service -- it's a win 70% of the time. That's hopeful for all the VC's, execs, and sales folks in the SAAS sector.