So midway through the beta phase of our SaaS solution, it struck me that what we have actually created is an incredibly powerful piece of technology that does all the things that the SaaS gurus (if anyone can claim to be one so early in the life cycle) say it will ie Global Reach, Frictionless Deployment possibilities, blah blah blah, you have heard or read them all before. So much so that we have attracted interest from various venture capital funds on the hunt for equity in viable BI vendors – but I digress, and can leave the VC discussion to another day.
What we have effectively done is merge old fashioned BI principles and solutions with old style web distribution capacity and ended up with good old fashioned Web Marketing challenges. Here’s the scenario, a business owner or financial director of a company running Sage50 as their accounting package, can run his or her management pack (and ultimately all reports) from the cloud, which is delivered to their desktop in a pre-formatted Excel wookbook, regardless of where in the world they may be, 24/7/365. Here lies the problem, there are probably in excess of 400 000 companies world wide running Sage50 (not to mention the millions of other mid size businesses on other accounting packages like MYOB, which we can also service) whose businesses desperately need this solution to save time and make better decisions, but don’t know it even exists in the cloud, so how do I tell them?
Having lived through the burst of the .com bubble this all leaves a very strong sense of deja vu! But things have moved on and one needs to reconsider the vast landscape of the World Wide Web and all its new functionality, processes and social networking possibilities for it to all start to make sense again. Yes, we do have a massive web marketing challenge on our hands, but I can’t help but think that this time it is different – in other words, and in my opinion, this time the move to the cloud is a permanent one – and I would be interested to know how many other companies are experiencing these issues, and what steps they are taking to get their SaaS solution to their global market.
