SaaS Growth with Technology Initiatives

The recording and the slides for the Microsoft / Mural SaaS webinar have been posted on the webinar's website. The webinar provides practical tips and guidance to emerging SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) vendors to achieve market success. Various Microsoft partners address different challenges faced by growing SaaS ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) like; identifying the right hosting solution (hosting), lead nurturing (marketing), using technology to identify growth opportunities (technology) and expanding business through referrals (operations / account management).
This free 90 minutes webinar is a great value for any Business / Technical Decision Makers in the SaaS community.

I represented Blue Star Infotech, a Microsoft technology partner, providing guidance on how SaaS vendors can leverage technology innovations to grow their SaaS business. Excerpts below:

Many SaaS vendors limit their user experience / client access modality to web channel. While web ensures ubiquitous access, it also necessitates having an internet channel and limits the client capabilities to the sandbox environment of the browsers. Vendors can significantly expand the reach and the usability of their application by providing desktop clients with offline capabilities (Smart Clients) that can provide some core functionalities in offline mode and leverage full power of desktop environment. The productivity of the users can be significantly enhanced by providing them access to the SaaS application from within productivity tools like Office Outlook, Excel, Word.

SaaS providers should consider consuming various utility cloud services available in the cloud (like weather, map etc) to augment their core solution with low-cost but highly usable peripheral features. They can also greatly benefit from infrastructure cloud services (like storage, identification, computation etc) optimizing their operational expenses.

SaaS ISVs should take the advantage of their access to customers’ data, analyzing various data elements core to their ecosystem through the recorded transactions, building kind of intelligence that can help them not just cross-sell / up-sell their other services but come up with altogether new services.

To be able to sell their solutions to large enterprises, SaaS providers should ensure that their solution integrates well within enterprise environment, providing:

• UI integration – to make their solution consistent with enterprise customer’s UI / branding guidelines
• Data integration – to share data with other enterprise apps
• Process integration – to enable business process workflow
• Security integration – to enable single sign on
• Operational integration – transparently working with the enterprise’s IT and helpdesk support

All of these would not only ensure growth for the SaaS businesses but would also increase the stickiness of their SaaS solution in the customer environment – a customer, who has installed any component of the solution and has integrated the solution with other apps in their environment, is less likely to get rid of the solution than the others who have not!