My favourite SaaS solutions web.

I am a great fan of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solutions. I think they are the future of IT. In a few years tha amount of computing done on SaaS environments and cloud-computing will exceed the amount of computing done "on-premises".

I created a web page to list some of my favourite SaaS solutions and good examples on how they are used. I also want to promote SaaS solutions "Made in Estonia". :-)

If you know a good SaaS solution for internet forums can you comment on it? I looked for one some time ago, but unfortunately didn't find any good ones, but there must be for sure!

More SaaS in the future

Last week IDC published results of its recent survey stating that despite to economic slowdown (or maybe thanks to it) SaaS revenues are going to grow faster than they predicted previously. 40,5% instead of 36%.

The key driver for this is probably the will to save. Less earnings means that businesses are more flexible. So they are ready to fit their working procedures to the standard way of doing things if they can benefit from the "$1 per month per user" software pricing.

At the moment the only thing that sells is "saving money". High availability, pretty design, convinient, fast and powerful is out. Cheap is in.

But if we talk about the SaaS market then it is not going to fall after the economy has started to go up again. It is an irreversible change that is going to happen. In 10 years time developing your own CRM or sales software will sound as stupid as developing your own e-mail or office software sounds now. But this means a lot of integrating and customization.

...and most probably there will be a time when you will have to consider all the data anywhere to be public. :-)

Can you do small-time SAAS

There was recently a post on Phil Wainewright's SAAS blog about how to manage the finances of a SAAS solution. "The scary" part of the post to me is the amount money needed and the share size of even a medium sized SAAS business. Is it possible to have a decent size SAAS service in Europe where a 1000 server solution is a big and rare phenomenon.

Well, I think that for niche SAAS applications there is a good chance. And even with a 10 server installation you could run a solution for 1000 users and earn a decent profit. But the principal economic math running it is the same as with big solutions. Every new customer brings new demand for capacity and service and therefore means upfront investment. The revenue is collected afterwards so the cashflow should be calculated with good care.

A wisdom of economics: companies don't go bankrupt because they have negative net profit, they go bankrupt because they run out of money. This is true also vice versa - a business can have really good net profit, but can still go bust because it runs out of money.

IT is less than half technology...

There seems to be a difference between the SaaS/IT Startup thinking and the traditional SAP like thinking. The SaaS applications and the IT startups are really good tools, easy to start using, cheap to start using and convinient. Yes, but.... But for an organization, or actually for every IT system that is used by more than one person, the processes of using it become really important. Somebody has to implement those changes processes, somebody has to change the old ways of working and has to figure out what the new ways are.

The biggest IT systems, like the e-health systems, that MicroLink is programming and installing, need changes in legislation.

So an advice for the startup and SaaS world - if your product is meant for more than one - think of partnering with consultant firms! Somebody that sells and implements your product.

Business idea giveaway: A SaaS solution portal

Here is a good business idea for anyone of you who want to make it as an enterpreneur:
A SaaS solution portal for business decision makers who are choosing an IT solution for their company.

Here is a picture on how the portal might look like. The portal should have:
- Industry specific pages. (For example the picture above is for IT hosting companies).
- On each page boxes that represent a domain of applications (like CRM, Sales, HR...)
- On each box some sponsored logos.
- Each box will be a link to a list of SaaS solutions in that domain.

Besides the industry pages you should have a news and forum pages to bring customers, readers and for SEO. You could write reviews of the solutions being offered. The goal of the portal should be to gain authority of opinion.

You should also have a registration page for SaaS providers.

The money would come from SaaS providers who want to have their solution on the front page or in the beginning of the listing.

The competition. I found one: http://www.saas-showplace.com/, but they have a serious drawback. They list SaaS providers, not solutions. For example try to find an HR solution from their portal. :-) They have made the mistake of being provider centric not customer centric. A customer does not want to partner with some SaaS provider, but wants to find a solution for his specific needs.

The initial investment? A good web-page guy can do the portal in maximum a month on Joomla. You should make contacts with people from the industries you want to draw a page about and ask what software domain's are needed by their industry. A day to set up each industry domain. Then 4 hours a day for blogging, foruming and commenting to spread the word about the new portal. After gaining some momentum you release a "get on the first page with your logo for $10/day campaing". And when the portal gets more popular you change the $10/day to an auction. (like Google AdWords.)

This would be a very useful portal as it is absolutely very difficult to find a SaaS solution among these hundreds of providers and it is quite difficult for the SaaS providers to find the customers as they usually target a niche audience.

...and hey.. you could do the same portal for non-SaaS solutions. :-)