November 13, 2007 | Posted By : William Toll at 9:21 AM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (0)

Vendors to Hosting Providers

Being a product management professional at hosting companies for eight years now, I have had the opportunity to listen to a lot of "pitches" - for services ranging from web design tools to intrusion detection systems. I am always amazed that many of these companies do not know how to "talk to me" and have not "done research" on our industry.

In reviewing opportunities and preparing business cases I keep the following points in mind:

-Choosing a vendor with a service/product that customers want and an experience that customers will find intuitive and elegant
-Choosing a vendor that understands our business model
-Choosing vendor that has a long term strategy
-Choosing a vendor that can support these services over time

The business opportunity for these vendors looking for growth and market share in our industry often find two results: little or a lot. The companies that are successful in the middle have a habit of disappearing or becoming a commodity.

Often times these days it comes down to the business model. Hosting margins can be high and hosting companies expect the same high margins on the add-on services we are bundling. The problem is many of the vendors in our space are moving off perpetual licensing business models to monthly services/licensing revenue models. Having not experienced 30 or more months of recurring revenue from a customer, like hosting companies do, these vendors do not know how to license and price their service.

On the other end of the spectrum are companies that aggressively sign-up hosting companies only to have a wavering interest in our space or a short term strategy. That leaves hosting companies customers with a bad experience, especially when you have to retire the offering. A good example from my distant past was PowerMailbox. They signed up over 50 hosting companies, only to have been sold and shut down less than one year from launching. Another example is a famous Anti-Spam vendor, who, after being acquired by a famous software company seemed to have stopped updating their platform.

In the end, it's about choosing services that your customers want from vendors that understand your business model and are in it for the long run.

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May 16, 2007 | Posted By : William Toll at 5:34 PM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (1)

SaaS - Definition Differs by Customer

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform! Customers have been actively using SharePoint to enhance their businesses ability to collaborate, and enhance their business processes for years. WSS v3 takes the platform to the next level. If you have not looked at SharePoint in the last few years or at WSS v3, I encourage you to have a look.

This week I spoke to an Intermedia.NET Windows SharePoint Services customer. Cybernetic Learning Systems (CLS), a product technical training company, has been using Windows SharePoint services to manage consulting and training engagements with customers. They specialize in developing training for sales & marketing management, product management, and technology at global 1,000 companies. Today it is common for large corporations to bring in professionals to develop and implement a training program. CLS is also a vendor for other companies that need to supply a training component during an implementation.

If you can imagine, CLS is managing many projects and training programs for many companies at one time. One of their core uses of Windows SharePoint Services is to track projects, tasks and people. WSS is a world class, yet affordable solution that was simple to implement for the company. The templates included with SharePoint allowed CLS to quickly get started with managing their projects and clients. A SharePoint project site is a key component of each of their engagements.

They also use SharePoint to share documents with their partners and clients. Many of their clients already have intranets, however gaining access and creating a shared documents library can take a long time for a large company's IT team to set-up and create access profiles for. A secure WSS document sharing site can be created in a short time by CLS.

CLS has been an Intermedia.NET customer since the late 1990's. They have continued to evolve and grow and chose hosted Windows SharePoint services to solve a need. They told me that their core competency is training, and not managing servers and applications.

So, do you think SharePoint is a hosted application? To me, SharePoint is the ultimate SaaS platform - it's got all the core plumbing and features that are needed to build customizeable and scalable applications. With WSS v3, SharePoint has become a viable alternative. I attend the SharePoint user group meetings in NYC, and the buzz, user & developer interest and attendance is at the highest level ever!

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