Tasos Christidis

In an older post, I explored the impact of SaaS in the Outsourcing business (see here:   SaaS and the outsourcing function ) and the benefits that any outsourcing company and its customers would   enjoy from the adoption of SaaS. In this post I shall explore the benefits that the Cloud computing/SaaS can have in another area: that of the Franchise business. In a Franchising model there is the part of the Franchisor (the company that offers the franchise product) and the franchisee (the companies that reside “below the umbrella” of the franchisor and reach out to the final customer). In any franchise “package” a number of products and services is offered to the franchisee in order to start and maintain a viable business; typically, this includes stock replenishment for the franchisor’s products, training, sales support etc. In some cases, the franchisor also offers the necessary software to run the franchisee business. And this is the issue that we are interested in, tod...

Software as a Service has come to a point to offer a large variety of applications. In its beginning it was all about simple functions, since vendors weren’t too sure about the future of this business (and therefore they were reluctant to make big investments in that area) but also due to the technical complexities that needed to be sorted out before one could deploy and offer an enterprise-scale application (issues like security, access rights, redundancy, disaster recovery, virtualization etc. were not solved in one night). Today, one significant part of the SaaS business is the Accounting Software. One can find a number of vendors that offer this kind of software, starting from small, local businesses and going as high as international players such as QuickBooks and others. But, today, I would like to explore whether there can be a future dominant SaaS Accounting Software, or local solutions will maintain their market share . The basis of thinking is that, although Account...

In the previous post we made a brief reference to “tangible” costs and income that the cloud infrastructure incurs/generates to the XaaS vendor. Such issues are well known and adequately followed by standard accounting practices (charging expenses, recording the purchase of assets and tracking their depreciation and, of course, customer invoicing for your income). The new dimension that we discussed is this of “intangible” or “non-monetary” values that exist in a XaaS infrastructure, and especially the magnitude of unused capacity that is there. In this post I will demonstrate that basic accounting rules and handling can help keep track of these non-monetary values in a way that is transparent and, hopefully, acceptable by the majority of finance managers . First you need to define what these values are: I spoke about disk space (used and unused), number of physical machines, logical machines and processor cores and average processor usage. Other dimensions may also exist… I also spoke...

The whole idea of XaaS is the ability of the customers to add or subtract users or computing power (thus, workload on the vendor’s infrastructure) as they please, because they have tangible monetary benefit from this fluctuation; they pay for more only when they really need it and when they don’t their monthly expenses go down. This fluctuation creates spikes and valleys in the infrastructure of the vendor, which follow the customers’ “horsepower” needs. There are other metrics, though, that are never (or almost never) decreased. Perhaps the rate of increase fluctuates but it is almost never negative. The most characteristic example is this of the consumed disk space in the infrastructure: it is always increasing (unless of course a massive number of customers leave the service, which is highly unlikely). These considerations create the need for some kind of accounting tracking of the infrastructure that is being used (or not used) and also some kind of depiction in financial stateme...

In the previous post we saw what makes a SaaS space, a “community”: It’s a collection of people with similar business competencies and/or similar everyday issues pertinent to the SaaS application that they are using. We also discussed that it is only in the SaaS world that these users have the technical capability to instantly interact (in any other application community, they would have to meet each other in separate blogs, forums etc.) Today, we shall give some practical ideas of how this community could interact and share and the topics of that conversation. Implement “user group news”: The SaaS desktop could provide a special space where news and alerts regarding the application would be released or communicated, for all users to read through. For example, new functionality that was added, explanations about a recent slowdown event, new pricing policies on behalf of the vendor are just some examples of what the “user group news” could be about. The easiest way to do this, outside ...

Any SaaS service is the gathering space or meeting point of a large (hopefully!) number of users. Depending on the scope of the application, these users may belong to similar business spaces/ventures/competencies or not. Even if they don’t, they share at least some kind of appreciation for the benefits of SaaS (such as lowering actual costs, real time access from anywhere etc.). One more aspect in what these users are sharing is the everyday issues that they face with the usage of the application. Known bugs, common functionality enhancements, user interface issues etc. Who is better equipped to help you, than your co-user in the same SaaS space? Yes, you would expect that the application is equipped with some on-line help or perhaps a written user’s manual. But, SaaS applications are moving at the edge of technology and functional updates and upgrades are being done very often; much too often for a written document to keep up. Keeping a written user’s manual up-to-date is very hard a...

When we are talking about SaaS, we usually mean software applications, offered to the end user through internet and operated in a web browser. SaaS delivery model uses the “cloud space” in order to reach out to the end user. This means that when you sign up to such a service, you can’t really be sure where the actual server resides. It could be as far as the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, for all you know! Therefore, in some cases, the traditional sales model of “salesperson demos to your premises and then fetches a signed contract to you” does not work. Local representation may not exist in your geographical area and the only way to sign up for these services is through the vendor’s web site: Typically, you will order the number of users that you wish, enter your company’s name and finally “check out” from the “e-shop” using your credit card or other payment service. Sounds simple, as simple as buying a book from Amazon, but it isn’t! There are a number of issues that are raised; i...