ISPCON: Ravi Agarwal Still Making the Case for SaaS
- By Liam Eagle on October 17, 2007
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FacebookAttended the morning session “Strategies for Growing your Hosted Business” yesterday, delivered by Ravi Agarwal, CEO of groupSPARK and Rich Bader, president and CEO of EasyStreet Online Services.
The presentation offered hosted Exchange as one such “strategy for growing your hosted business” – unsurprising given the involvement of groupSPARK, which provides a private-label platform for selling hosted services such as Microsoft’s Exhange, SharePoint and CRM.
Rich’s part of the presentation included some interesting insight on the process of selling hosted Exchange – EasyStreet is, among other things, a groupSPARK reseller. The company, he says, focuses a lot of its work on grassroots efforts, making itself known through posting in forums. EasyStreet employs a blogger who focuses on small business issues and has developed a following of small business readers.
He pointed out that the small business market is a business that deals specifically with relationships, and that those relationships with vendors are what convince small businesses to make purchases, with the exception of particularly low-value services.
Ravi’s contribution seemed a bit like the typical groupSPARK boilerplate. Admittedly I haven’t seen this particular presentation before – it’s just a feeling I got. The information had a lot to do with the value of a private label hosted exchange, a point I would have assumed groupSPARK had long since made. I know I’ve heard a similar (or identical) argument at almost every event I’ve been to in the last few years.
That, perhaps, was the most interesting aspect of the presentation for me – I wanted to know what the objective of the session was (for Ravi, in particular). Is he preaching to the choir? Are these attendees who actually haven’t heard the case for SaaS before? Or are they willingly submitting to being won over through repetition?
Fortunately, I had the opportunity to sit down with Ravi shortly after the presentation. He said it was a combination of a couple of those factors. Regardless of how often some of us may have heard that message, he says, some folks are hearing it for the first time. On the other hand, some people are in the process of making a decision about whether hosted private-label applications are something they want to involve in their business.
What’s more, he says, he makes contact with a few prospective (or eventual) customers after every one of these presentations. In fact, he met Rich at an ISPCON event two years ago.
It seems like the SaaS message still needs a bit of a push, even at the very basic level. It certainly answers a question that’s been nagging at me for a while.
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with We... (Read full bio)
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