Moving to the SaaS model in the Cloud
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In a recently conducted survey, commissioned by EQSN and carried out independently by Marketing Transformations, a number of key factors emerged that highlight the issues involved in moving applications to the cloud environment.
With EQSN supporting and hosting applications for software developers across multiple industries, including Financial Services and Healthcare, Ecommerce etc, we believe we can help by providing not just the technical support and managed hosting infrastructure, but also by giving you the necessary advice to help you ensure a successful SaaS implementation.
From this independent research there are 5 key things to consider before moving to your SaaS model:
1. Commercial considerations are often the key reason for failure of your SaaS implementation therefore step 1 is to develop your commercial terms for SaaS applications – How much will you charge in terms of monthly or annual fees, remembering to include everything in the fee. Tied to this you need to work out your costs and sales model. A direct, field-based sales force is unusual in SaaS and difficult to justify therefore your marketing and inbound and outbound telephone sales may be more important.
2. Legal considerations are important but for on-premise applications the focus is on protecting your software from piracy etc, but this changes in the SaaS model to commercial considerations, length of contract tie-in, cancellation clauses etc.
3. Technical and administration systems should be in place to ensure customers sign on and that the payments are handled simply and properly.
4. Collaboration. We do not recommend that you invest in the hardware and middleware infrastructure. We recommend that you work with hosting companies who can provide the necessary support and infrastructure to enable you to simply move your application to SaaS. Hosting applications is not the same as hosting web-sites, so make sure you choose a hosting supplier who has this experience.
5. Planning. Finally you need to consider the transition from the old model to the new SaaS service. Remember it is a service and your mind set needs to move from Software to Service.
For further reading....CIOs getting savvy about outsourcing (Silicon.com)
We hope you have found this information useful. For any further information please contact EQSN on 0845 458 3111 or email me at rmax@eqsn.net
Best regards,
Roger Maxfield
Sales Director