SaaStream

Why would SaaS adoption raise in an economic downturn?

As experienced in previous economic downturns, companies that invest smartly during the bad times, emerge quicker, and better equipped to grow faster after the recession. Thinking creatively about how to do more with less is the key to IT innovation during challenging times and allow companies not only to survive but also to seize the extraordinary opportunities that arise during periods of vast uncertainty. When you think about it, creative application of new technologies during weak economies actually gave rise to huge waves of productivity like Software-as-a-Service, Web 2.0 or social networking.

But fear is driving decisions at many companies these days, causing this unhealthy lock-up of budgets. Current miasma should not slow down or prevent companies from innovating and creating value so as to survive, weather the economic storm or even outperform competition.

Financial crises are often having a huge impact on IT departments, resulting in significant increases in business activity, placing greater burden on IT resources and forcing them to find new ways to boost productivity while slashing expenses. At times like these, it is highly recommended that companies seriously consider leveraging applications delivered via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, harnessing the broader value that these solutions can play in not only moving the business forward but moving it beyond the current economic crisis as well.

Indeed, CIOs should take a much closer look at SaaS solutions as a way to avoid significant up-front investments in new software platforms by simply “renting” on-demand applications that would provide added returns where most needed: the top line. SaaS would empower IT teams to achieve and sustain efficiency and quality, while facilitating the kind of cost-effectiveness that becomes a top priority during a recession.

SaaS is providing a faster and more economical way for organizations to deploy, run and utilize softwares. This flexibility is particularly valuable during economic uncertainty for the following obvious reasons:

1. Reduced upfront costs. SaaS makes it more affordable for budget-conscious organizations to implement the new applications they need to execute effectively their "recession-proofing" plans.
   
2. Reduced in-house IT overheads and increased focus on strategic IT projects. SaaS is helping the business through the economic downturn by freeing IT staff from deploying and maintaining in-house solutions.
   
3. Continuous quality of service. Even if business activity and the demand placed on technology solutions are often increasing significantly.
   
4. Lower licensing and maintenance costs, reduced overall cost of ownership, also smoothed by the actual SaaS subscription model.
   
5. Quicker, easier and less risky deployment and upgrade to new future versions. This reduced implementation risks together with the ability to respond more nimbly to changing business needs while smoothly and incrementally adding new capabilities are making this option significantly more attractive in tougher economic times.

A major advantage of SaaS solutions is the optimum flexibility provided, enabling companies to downsize or reorganize while minimizing waste by instantly reducing or increasing the size and scope of their solution, at any time.

These benefits mean that SaaS is now being increasingly used by companies in a number of areas, not only including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation but also enterprise collaboration, web conferencing and back-office requirements such as expense management, procurement, Supply Chain Management, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Human Resources functions to name a few.

In tougher economic times, companies want to shed the extra costs and risks inherent in large, long-term IT implementation projects. It is therefore becoming obvious that, as companies aggressively implement cost-cutting measures, IT organizations that leverage SaaS solutions will realize tremendous cost savings, while continuing to support the business' needs in the most flexible and effective manner.

SaaS is already an important part of mainstream IT in companies both large and small. Its basic value propositions are now widely established and accepted, including low upfront costs, simplified software management (for both maintenance and upgrades), effective security, high reliability, and increasingly, integrative capabilities to bridge data and functional gaps that exist as a result of existing systems and processes. It is therefore expected that SaaS solutions will gain significant share during and immediately following the current economic turmoil, since offering customers the ability to continue to innovate at a substantially lower absolute cost of entry and ongoing TCO, during a period of intense capital spending constraint.

For further insight on this topic, you may want to review a recent Gartner survey analysis  focusing on identifying usage patterns and key trends for SaaS within the enterprise, including SaaS usage per market segments, migration activity between deployment models, projected future usage and investment for both on-premises and on-demand, and the state of governance policies within enterprises currently using or planning to use SaaS.

New Year's top resolution: Managing your online reputation!

Well, 2009 has arrived, along with the New Year's resolutions and the ever-present pundit predictions. Now that we're on the other side of the New Year, I thought I would share my thoughts on what I feel should be one of the companies' top priorities - and probably their number 1 resolution for this year: Efficiently managing their online reputation.

Every day, a blogger or forum member is discussing something important to your business, being your company’s brand, your key executives, your competitors or your industry. They may be hyping your company and building positive buzz for your products or criticizing your services, complaining to others about the poor quality of your customer service. When you think about it, companies aren't just potentially facing negative consumer buzz. Criminals are starting to blackmail corporations by threatening to attack their reputations online and competitors can also get online and cause trouble.

Managing online reputation is fast becoming a growing problem for businesses. With the rise of social media and user-generated content, online reputation is not just a matter of tracking influential blogs. Millions of people can alter the content of popular sites, anonymous people can post rumours on obscure chat sites and popular consumer rating sites. The Internet has quickly become a complex ecosystem where public opinion can be created and disseminated within seconds. Keeping your eyes and ears on the world of consumer generated media can be a daunting task for any company. Blogs, forums, wikis and social networks gain popularity every day and without a plan to monitor and manage your company’s online reputation, you could be at risk.

A business's reputation will be based on an almost infinite amount of information sources. The Internet is a huge database of unstructured information. When everyone is a publisher, the likelihood of libel increases a millionfold. Accountability has fallen by the wayside."
Toby Bell, Research Vice President at Gartner, Inc.

A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious and managing your business’s online reputation is key to owning your brand. Many enterprises are only just starting to understand the importance of online reputation management. It is fast becoming critical for marketing and communication, legal counsel, corporate risk management and the line of business alike to really understand how to better monitor, manage and measure online reputation and to remedy problems faster when they occur. There are so many conversations out there that there is simply no effective manual way to identify them all, to figure out whether there is something to take action on, to react to or promote. Companies should therefore create policies and adopt technologies that can help analyse what is being said about them on the Internet and respond to conversations that can damage their reputations.

The proliferation of social media on the web empowers consumers to become influential, opinion-wielding publishers but also enables businesses to take the pulse of consumers as it pertains to their brands. There are a handful of vendors including Reputica, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Andiamo Systems, Market Sentinel or Visible Technologies to name a few, that offer services and technologies to help you monitor, protect, nurture and build a stellar reputation for your business. These solutions will help you gain a comprehensive understanding of what your customers are saying about your products & services, and proactively identify issues that have the potential to affect the reputation of your company, image or brand. You will be able to gain control of crisis situations with up-to-the-minute intelligence that helps you pinpoint the consumer state of mind on issues that can include product recalls, liability issues, consumer activism, negative publicity, corporate issues, news events, rumours or situations you never expected. Advanced monitoring, relevance detection, filtering, classification, sentiment & concept mining, modelling and scoring techniques as well as visualisation technologies will also enable you to leverage candid public conversations so you’re in the best possible position to repair your relationship with customers, stakeholders, regulators, the media, the public and other groups. 

But reputation management should not only be limited to large organisations. Companies of all sizes have competition and are experiencing the new reality of Internet-enabled consumers who are creating and sharing their experiences, opinion and content online. The MarketingPilgrim website published a great list of twenty six free "buzz tracking" tools that can be used to monitor your company reputation, track news that relate to your industry or even spy on your competition. As new social networks have gained increased importance, and new tools have come onto the scene, this recently updated list of 8 additional free social media monitoring tools is also well worth checking out.

To learn more about this topic, I encourage you to download the full copy of Risky Business: Reputations Online™, a white paper resulting from a worldwide online survey of senior executives conducted by Weber Shandwick in cooperation with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). This excellent white paper addresses issues including the vulnerability of company reputation, the resources executives rely upon to assess company reputation, the identification and prioritization of online risks to reputation, the impact of traditional and new media on reputation, the globalization and localization of digital reputation, the penetration of Web 2.0, the threat of employee cyber-sabotage, and most importantly, the best measures for protecting a company’s online reputation.

ROI study sheds light on Web conferencing benefits (3)

This is the final part of our analysis on the ROI of web conferencing.

In part 1 of this article on the business benefits of web conferencing, we have established that there is a business case for productivity with regard to the use of web conferencing, at least in the sales and training departments.  in part 2, with the help of Frost & Sullivan and WebEx, we found out that we were even able to underpin those conclusions with facts and figures.  As we concluded in this latter part of the article, the expected results in terms of productivity and return on investment, can be impressive.  In part 3 of this article - i.e. this one - we would like to stress a few points so as to delve deeper into the analysis of those numbers.

There are indeed - despite the undeniable quality of this document - a few grey areas which need to be underlined if we wish to refine our analysis of the web conferencing ROI.

First and foremost, the examples set forth in this ROI calculation white paper are high-tech examples, essentially with companies based in the United States. Secondly, the assumptions made in this document with regard to the investment of time savings into work (the so-called correction factor) are rather subjective and may even be deemed to lack transparency to a certain extent (see page 10 of the white paper  for details).  Results can indeed vary greatly according to enterprise size, staff Internet literacy, and also the location of a business. Thirdly, whereas a systematic increase in productivity through the replacement of physical meetings with remote conferencing is mentioned, there are still many cases in which face-to-face meetings are bound to be more efficient and we cannot entirely rule them out altogether. At least, it wouldn't yet seem feasible to me just now, and certainly not with regard to sales related meetings.  Fourthly, the lack of representativeness of the sample and the lack of historical data can actually cast a few doubts on this ROI exercise ...

ROI study sheds light on Web conferencing benefits (2)

This is part two of our article on web conferencing ROI based on the Frost & Sullivan and WebEx document dedicated to the return on investment for web conferencing services. In part one of this article, we have established that the main benefits which can be derived from web conferencing are not forcibly those that seemed obvious at first sight.  The prominence of the productivity factor is obvious.

However, one still has to build a business case around that and try and estimate how much productivity can be derived from the usage of this ICT tool, and what impact it can have on either sales, profits, or even other business factors such as the investment of this productive time into other activities which in turn can generate either more revenue and profits or even lead to a leaner organisation. 

Amongst the qualitative benefits which were uncovered by Frost & Sullivan and WebEx in the White Paper, we can actually list:

• Time savings implied by the reduction in travel,
• Positive impact on CO2 emissions,
• Improved communications between employees and partners in an ever increasingly globalised world where the workforce is scattered around the globe,
• Faster decisions and improved results ...

ROI study unveils benefits of Web conferencing

It's not just with Green IT that ROI calculations are a must. Conferencing is very much at the centre of most discussions on that topic at the moment. I believe that Cisco's much touted launch of its new telepresence system a couple of years ago has been very instrumental in putting conferencing - and video conferencing in particular - on top of the business agenda. The recent interest in environmental issues  (as in our new CO2 saving tool)  - no longer disconnected from business - has also triggered an outstanding revival in the conferencing market. Similarly, the accelerating pace of globalisation and the fact that business teams are now increasingly scattered across different regions is no longer a subject for the likes of Charles Handy (who warned us more than 13 years ago that virtual organisations were our future) but a reality that almost all knowledge employees have to live with and a potential opportunity that the most nimble of us can leverage. No doubt then that the demand for conferencing tools is rising.

Welcome to a new world where only the connected will survive!

Social networking and web 2.0 are changing the rules of the game and companies who recognise this and adapt their organisations accordingly will be on the path to high performance. If you have not had yet the opportunity to do so, I would highly recommend that you read Don Tapscott, Founder and Chairman of New Paradigm (now nGenera), most recent bestseller “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”. This excellent book highlights strategies for winning through next generation enterprises and challenges our most deeply rooted assumptions about business. This widely read book will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand the key forces driving competitiveness in the twenty-first century. 

You will learn why leaders must think differently about how to compete, be profitable, and embrace a new art and science of collaboration. You will also understand the deep changes occurring in the structure and modus operandi of corporations, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. 

The new mass collaboration is indeed challenging traditional business thinking and conventional principles. It is driving a historic change in how companies harness knowledge, co-innovate, encourage self-organisation and share resources. It is drastically changing the way goods and services are invented, produced, marketed, and distributed on a global basis. 

A tipping point has been reached with the growing accessibility of information technologies as well as the increased availability of computing power, network capability and tools required to collaborate, get organised, innovate, create value, compete and outperform competition. 

Many mature firms are already benefiting from this new business paradigm. These organisations have seized on collaboration and self-organisation as powerful new levers to cut costs, innovate faster, co-create with customers and partners, and generally do whatever it takes to become high-performance businesses. 

So is your mind wired for a new kind of collaborative enterprise?

E-commerce marketers increasingly investing in new richer online capabilities

With e-commerce growth rates predicted to decline, online businesses wishing to outperform competition and gain market share, are increasingly required to invest in order to differentiate themselves, deploy richer and innovative applications and deliver more personal, compelling and engaging online user experiences. 

Scene7, part of Adobe Systems, released the results of a business survey entitled "Web 2.0 Experience 2008 and beyond", identifying and analysing how online businesses will be investing in order to enhance their customer experience. Key findings indicated that more than 50 percent plan to deploy new features and rich Internet enhancements including enhanced imagery, personalisation and user-generated content to their sites within the next six months, with 93 percent wishing to deploy an increasingly engaging customer experience by the end of the year. Mobile commerce, widget sharing, personalised messaging and user ratings & reviews were identified as the greatest growth areas for innovation. Other top-ranking features included 360-degree spin, zoom and alternative views, microsites, videos, blogs, RSS and product tours together with online catalogs and personalized stores that were ranked as equally effective. 

Increased clicks, usage and conversions (for 6 out of 10 Web site operators) together with revenue growth (for nearly half of them) and qualitative feedback were reported as critical effectiveness indicators for measuring the success of these enhancements and additional investments in these new functionalities. Other evaluation metrics included reduced abandonment rates (35.5%), increased repeat purchases (29.6%) and higher average order size (28.4%).

E-commerce is still just scraping the surface of its full potential. For further insight on this topic, I would highly recommend this excellent white paper from Scene7 which discusses historical factors that have brought the industry to its current state, identifies five key principles expected to guide the next phase of e-commerce, outlines barriers & considerations and discusses how leaders & innovators are now bringing some dramatic changes to win and differentiate in the next phase.

Community marketing: UGC is part of the Internet DNA

The tide of marketing is turning at last.  After more than 13 years of battling against autistic -- and largely inefficient -- old world marketing techniques and visions, we are now witnessing a few cracks in the ice of top-down marketing strategy.  Firstly, Regis Mc Kenna and Geoffrey Moore introduced new ways of dealing with clients mainly in the IT world at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s.  The approach was no longer demographic but behavioural.  Secondly, European researchers Badot & Cova wrote their ground-breaking opus entitled "neo-marketing[Fr]" in 1992 (many were to follow) introducing so-called "societal" approaches to marketing and even suggesting we use the term "societing [En]" instead of marketing.

The end of the 1990s were the founding years of -- not only of the Internet but -- the revision of marketing as we know it.  Seth Godin taught us that ideas are viruses -- and so are products and services -- hence the newer and more pervasive notions of Buzz marketing.  He also re-educated us (yes, I insist, really re-educated) so that we ask permission from our clients to do business with them.  Not only was that the early sign that e-mail marketing had to be done differently, but it also sent a clear warning sign to mass marketers that business habits had to change in view of evolving consumer behaviours.  1999 was the kick-off year for the much revered Clue-train manifesto, a source which is still quoted today as the reference for online marketing.  And more recently, Tara Hunt has developed the notion of Pinko marketing, a rather weird and politically orientated way of putting that communication power is handed over to the people. Yet, this is very effective when it comes to getting the message across.  Even more recently, François Laurent published a new book entitled marketing 2.0[Fr].  Marketing 2.0 is in fact the sequel to his influential blog: marketing is dead[Fr], but what is really striking is that François -- a former marketer at European consumer electronics manufacturer Thomson -- is more widely known as the president of one of the two French associations of marketing: Adetem.  Lastly Alain Thys is adding to the bargain by expostulating in his excellent marketing accountability presentation that marketing is not only dead but that it committed suicide in front of its shareholders, clients and even the earth!  Nothing less.

No doubt this time, things are moving ahead, even though the proportion of UGC is still low, there is an underlying trend of change, and this is not coming back to what it was before. As it is becoming more and more obvious to all that markets really are conversations there is this requirement for a growing number of enterprises to quickly be in sync with this evolution and gear up to community marketing.

Business to benefit from evolution of journalism

An article by Rachel Meranus:

"Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: Understanding the changing face of journalism can be the key to getting more coverage for your business" is providing insight in the media revolution which is unfolding before our very eyes. As a matter of fact, it enables us to connect all the dots and understand why the overall picture is changing, and not just business or journalism in isolation. Let's face it, this is a whole paradigm shift, one which was announced years ago  (by Don Tapscott actually, who co-authored Wikinomics last year) and is now happening on a large scale. So, what have we learnt?

On the one hand, there is "the changing face of journalism", which is now a fact and no longer a threat: Numerous layoffs, restructuring, new business models, advertising revenues going away.

There are no technical barriers and UGC (User-Generated Content) is a means  of direct communication vs top-down communication. Advertising was teaching lessons, UGC is about showing the way. Not just a new way of writing, but a whole new Pinko attitude related to client interaction.

The way people use information is different. Before, they sat down and information was sorted out and filtered out for them by papers. Now, Internet enables on demand information requests. RSS enables push ...

The Do's and Don'ts of corporate blogging (3/3)

Writing in a blog is not very complex, but there are a few guidelines which should be respected as much as can be.  This list of Do's and Don'ts of corporate blogging can be treated as a Charter describing which rules to follow, and each expert should confirm that they are blogging according to these defined guidelines.

• One: Do not try and sell your products. Writing on the blog has to be natural and have to be closer to the spoken language. Avoid using cheap marketing arguments at all costs. Don't even think about listing the qualities or benefits of your products. A blog, let alone an expert blog, is not made for this, but to establish expertise and reputation.
• Two: Publish as much as you can. The more articles you will deliver, the greater your promotion on the web. A professional corporate blog which starts will only have a few articles referenced/indexed within Google, whereas an older blog or website will already have hundreds or more.
• Three: Avoid typos and spelling/grammar mistakes at all cost. This is a very common mistake. A lot of bloggers think that, because you're in a hurry, you don't have to worry so much about spelling or grammar. But this is a very bad habit. The writing has to be natural, which doesn't mean that it has to be bad. And if your articles are very pertinent and interesting but badly written, you will attract many impertinent and unpleasant comments. Being a corporation also helps as it should enable you to get others to proof read your text. However, I strongly recommend that you avoid rewriting expert text to give a communications flavour to it. This would be very unbecoming.
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