Even though small and medium sized business owners have the most to gain from migrating to the cloud, in some cases they are the most hesitant to do so. In my experience, this has mainly not stemmed from fear but from not knowing all the resources available and knowing the advantages of doing so. One thing to remember is that most small and medium sized business owners are successful because they are knowledgeable and passionate in their field and do not necessarily carry that same passion and commitment towards IT trends, research, etc.
Although their are many advantages to a cloud solution, one large advantage the cloud gives and SMB owners crave is the ability to be adaptable. Small and Medium sized businesses have to be able to adapt to changing business and customer needs quickly and at little cost.
SaaS solutions directly cater to this need:
1. SaaS solutions allow customers to gain the advantage from multiple software upgrades delivered by the vendor. If there is a change or a better way of doing things that gets incorporated in the SaaS solution, all customers get this change quickly.
2. SaaS solutions are designed to make it easy for business owners to customize their applications quickly and simply. Changing the look of a business' site or workflow used to be a task requiring a large IT team. Now, with some simple clicks and drags and drops, business owners can change the way they do business more quickly.
Small and medium sized businesses have the most to gain from moving to or implementing in the cloud.
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Brian, how do SaaS providers account for potential disruptions that multiple upgrades can cause? Not every application is used to its fullest extent, or even to its intended purpose. What happens if one of the upgrades unintentionally harms a customer's workflow? While working as a production coordinator I used a SaaS program called "P3Expeditor". P3 is a printing production software, but we used only parts of the program for our workflow, including adapting database fields for our own codes. When the vendor changed those fields, our coding system became scrambled. What would be the best solution for a vendor for that possibility?
ReplyDeleteLindsey,
ReplyDeleteThis is an excellent question because it strikes to the heart of "flexibility/changeability vs. improving a business process" debate. Many SAAS providers have adopted a very open release cycle/schedule policy to deal with this issue. They not only give a preview of what is to come in an upgrade, but they research and pose potential problems before they occur. This opens a dialogue between with customers. It is advantageous to the SAAS provider not only as a preventative measure but as a way to find out how customers are using their product. As a former product manager, that is feedback I always died to have.