Strengthening social fabric - Key to Web 2.0 success

Web 2.0 is considered to be a open platform where the customers or users are never locked in. But with new monetizing opportunities, no Web 2.0 companies would like to loose their user base. Attractive and unique services, will provide only initial success and help to attract new customers. Once you get these customers it is very important to tie him into and spin a strong web around him, so that he wont leave.
Web 2.0 is about bring people together, knitting them in multiple ways and strengthening the relationship. Consider yahoo as an example, see how it brings people together, through multiple channels - email, chat, photo sharing, groups and so on. Even if a new better email application arrives, Yahoo customers will not be willing to move to the email system as yahoo has enabled multiple channels of connect for its users and they are already using them and have created a strong binding with the people who matter to them. Moving to a new provider will be a major disruption for these users.
Technorati tags: Web 2.0, Social Fabric

Service Delivery platforms - The CRM for SaaS

One of the core requirement for SaaS companies is to have a strong service delivery platform. These platforms are the self service platform where customers can provision the service, perform basic user management, monitor their usage, get their bills and so on.

To me it looks like CRM for SaaS. Most of the CRM implementations today are moving towards self service. It makes most of economy sense to move to a self-service as the number of customers increases. For SaaS as cost is a very important factor and to have persons attending to individual customers is going to only increase the cost, hence it makes sense to create a self-service portal for customers.

In fact, the service delivery platform like JamCracker today talks less on the self-service for customer support and training, that should be the focus going forward in the service delivery infrastructure. And since SaaS and Web 2.0 has a good linkage, community driven support / training, where users help users should be the way forward.

I think it will not be a bad idea to take some of the self-service CRM product and try it out for Service Delivery.

Technorati tags: SaaS, Software as a Service, Web 2.0, JamCracker, CRM, Self-Service

On-Premise to On-Demand

In the recent past, we find some of the traditional software vendors moving to on-demand based offering. One of the major growth drivers for these companies is their existing on-premise customers. Companies like SAP, which has a huge 30+Billion $ revenue today, might make it attractive for its existing on-premise customer to move on-demand -- in fact, its hybrid model where the same software can run both on on-demand and on-premise make it very attractive and easy to do this.

But, there is a catch, what will happen to custom applications or extensions these existing customers have built around these software, unless SAP or other major vendors are able to provide a platform and a migration path for these applications to make them also co-exist in their on-demand system, they will not be successful in migrating these customers to their on-demand eco system.

I would be very-much interested to see how majors like SAP provide a migration path for their existing on-premise customers.

Technorati tags: SaaS, Software as a Service, SAP