We recently hosted Greg Gianforte, and a handful of his team for an open discussion on SaaS (Software as a Service) at Sonar6 HQ. Greg is the CEO and founder of RightNow Technologies, and is also well known for his published ideas on bootstrapping. RightNow sells on demand CRM software to about 1800 customers worldwide.
SERVICE
work done by somebody for somebody else as a job, a duty, a punishment, or a favour
SOLUTION
a method of successfully dealing with a problem or difficulty
Semantics you say – but is this different from Software as a Service ?
To me it is– I have been trying to segment the SaaS market more effectively in terms of those solutions that target a market need and service that need through a 100% web based solution.
Thanks to those of you subscribed to Gartner for the heads up – we were pretty chuffed to be one of the four “Cool Vendors” in their recent Finance and HCM research:
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=502272&ref=g_fromdoc
Apologies to those who don’t subscribe to Gartner – we will have a release out shortly once it has been approved.
It’s also interesting to see that the others listed all have some potential synergy with the talent management field, especially when you take into account the Talent Science approach we have been proposing (Talent_Science.pdf )
A big focus of the talent management space at the current time is around integration – clients supposedly driving the quest for the “ultimate package”; a complete suite of functionality across all the elements of the talent “circle” from acquisition to retention.
Jason Corsello knows his stuff. He should do; he is in the privileged position of looking at and evaluating the software and strategy of the future in HR technology and services. Great blog at http://jasoncorsello.blogs.com/jason_corsellos_weblog/
Fantastic summit in the Bay area this week around the future of software - http://stanfordsummit.goingon.com/permalink/post/866
After speaking with some very successful people in and outside of New Zealand over the last few days, it seems the service mentality is spreading fast. Further reinforced this week by Steve Ballmer from Microsoft talking about their future direction to … you guessed it: services and solutions.
Phil Wainewright is a man with plenty of exposure to software and its evolution in the marketplace. I really enjoyed his latest piece on usability of software - Users always have the final say - how is it that so much software gets developed without usability as a key criterion?
Software users always vote with their fingers and it costs companies millions. It doesn’t take me long to think of an example - a company I worked for that deployed three CRM systems in 4 years at a cost of millions - all decommissioned within months of go live!
Make it usable or don’t bother.
It’s been another huge week in the world of Sonar6. Customers take less than 5 minutes to engage in their own specific issues around people and their management and growth.
This week we saw a large and consistent amount of pressure around the retention of staff - a key person snaffled away for 40k more than market rate, a star sales person leaving without so much as an “I’m unhappy and you need to take better care of me”.
It’s happening everywhere and it’s unlikely to stop, or is it?
What do you think?