[Note: This is a comment I wrote on the blog post "TalkBack: 'A Feeding Frenzy for SaaS Detractors'" on ZDNet's Software as Services blog:]
"SaaS Providers do Customize"
The focus on software customization is somewhat mis-placed, since for most business processes, even large businesses derive competitive advantage from how well they operate the process rather than some unique feature in the software.
An SaaS provider also has pretty complete functionality coverage once they've enabled all the process permutations across 50-100 large customers in a variety of industries around the world. All these permutations and features are configurable on/off in the SaaS software, which is why SaaS's first answer to specific features is often "it's configurable".
In addition, mature SaaS business-process software is configurable beyond functionality and process flows - it also has configurable look-and-feel, verbiage (customers can call objects and attributes what they want), data elements, etc. Finally, some SaaS "configuration" is actually quasi-coding, where the customer utilizes a tool set to design workflows or reports or UI elements - akin to Erik's proposal to move "down the stack" and provide components.
But addressing the customization question directly, SaaS providers can customize, especially those focused on selling to large enterprises. In our development cycle, we have "maintenance releases" every 4-6 weeks specifically targeted at customer-specific features and system integrations needed for go-live. This allows us to fully implement large customers in 2-3 months, including process design and configuration, initial data loading, system integrations, and end-user training.
In ongoing relationships with customers, SaaS providers are very motivated by revenue to increase system usage, gain adoption throughout the customer's enterprise, and retain customers over the long-term. As a result, in our case, we have hundreds of examples where a customer requested functionality and we put it into the next functional release cycle.
It also makes sense that our product team would be far better at adding core features than a system integrator or customer IT developer, because we are "close to the process" as Erik advocates, working directly with customers on their process goals and specific functionality requests, and also because we directly support all our customers and users every day.
So, in contrast to Erik's proposal to have the IT group or customer directly customize the software, we can add features far more quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively on our platform than anyone else. And the best part is that any features we create are fully supported, usually available to all other customers through configurability, maintained indefinitely, and automatically upgraded to each new version.
The other key aspect of SaaS is that all this is done in an fast-feedback iterative manner. Erik mentions finding issues "a few months before go-live" - that would be well before our SaaS implementation project even starts! With customer-intimate ongoing responsiveness to evolving business needs, true SaaS leverages both deep and broad configuration as well as customization as needed to deliver far more value, more quickly and at a far lower total cost than on-premise software.
- John Martin www.BuildingSaaS.com
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