SaaS enablement for Business Services companies

There are a lot of SaaS enablement service offerings from various enablers today. which are primarily targeted towards ISV's. One of the major focus area to me could be business services companies. Companies who provide business services on non-core but critical functions of enterprises could well be targeted for SaaS. Lets assume a transportation / logistics company, who provide business services in the area of logistics could be a potential candidate to sell SaaS, some of the examples like ADP acquiring employease is a clear indication towards this trend. Its time enablers think beyond ISV's and target Business services market, and create something interesting for them.

Technorati tags: SaaS, Software as a Service, Business Services

SaaS Pricing - A Web 2.0 Approach

Pricing in the SaaS world still reflects more like an on-premise version. SaaS applications are still sold as Standard, Professional and Enterprise version at different price.

Lets look at what email as a service providers do, take for an instance yahoo, it provides basic email services free of cost to the users, now for most of us who use yahoo for our personal emails , the basic feature set is more than sufficient. Yahoo generates revenue for this basic service through their ad program.

Now, for people who don't want to be disturbed by the ads and who want premium service levels, higher storage, POP access, it charges such customers. Now is there a lesson here for , SaaS providers? of course yes !

SaaS applications can be adopted by individuals to make their work more effective, on other other end of the spectrum it is adopted by enterprise to automate a specific business function, now why should we charge in a similar way to both, the individual might not require the SLA's like an enterprise, they might not access the services through webservices, they don't have any huge integration requirements and of course will not have problem if you serve them ads, so give them the service free and charge the enterprise, differentiate using the service levels and feature.

Technorati tags: SaaS, Software as a Service, Web 2.0, Pricing