This morning I was a panelist in a conversation hosted by Mike Dunham from Scio Consulting where we discussed Agile Marketing in SaaS. The other panelists were Peter Cohen and Justin Pirie, both who have a lot of experience in SaaS marketing. It was a great conversation where we discussed how marketing in a SaaS world needs to be as agile as software development. You need to think differently about your products and customers. Today everyone wants an application to be easy to use with little to no training. If a customer can’t get value out of a SaaS application quickly, you as a provider have failed.
There was a great discussion about SaaS driving communities of users to help each other. If you can build social tools into your product to help customers engage with each other and with the provider, you hit a home run. If the users and other companies create an ecosystem around your product, that drives your cost of customer acquisition down. Customers will sell your products for you by word of mouth. Think about iTunes, Salesforce.com or FreshBooks. Passionate users are your best sales people. Read the rest of this entry »
This is from http://blog.sciodev.com/2009/10/30/saas-agile-marketing-the-wheel-of-death/
In our first two podcasts for Haut Tech Conversations we covered service and pricing. Both subjects are critical for SaaS businesses to consider and understand in the context of their product. In the podcast we did yesterday, we went into yet another critical area – Marketing!
To put us in the right frame of mind for this conversation, we brought the respected expert on SaaS Marketing, Peter Cohen of SaaS Marketing Strategy Partners together with our panel – Ron Arden, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing for eDocument Sciences and Justin Pirie, a SaaS and Cloud product manager and marketer who has been working in subscription software for over four years.
Read the rest of this entry »
In a recent blog post on security in the cloud, Attorney Seaton Daly discusses different approaches that Microsoft and Google are using to gain some security credence in their cloud offerings. As more data breaches continue to make headlines, cloud providers want to ensure customers that their services are secure. Microsoft is looking for legitimacy in the US Federal government and is pursuing the ISO 27001 information security standard. Google is pursuing the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) standards for much the same reason; Microsoft is also pursuing FISMA. There is no agreed upon standard for cloud security, but the ISO 27001 standard remains one of the best security benchmarks available.
Pursuing an ISO certification makes more sense than a US-only standard, since they are widely recognized and accepted internationally. If Google and others want to give their customers a sense of security about their data, this seems logical. As with all technology, the products come before the standards. Companies like to be first out of the gate so they can claim they do it better than their competitors and so they can influence the coming standards. Hopefully a cloud security certification is coming soon. Read the rest of this entry »
Today is Mole Day. If you remember your high school or college chemistry, you probably know what a mole is. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a very large number (6.02 x10^23) that represents the number of atoms in a unit of an element, like Carbon. Years ago, chemists came up with Mole Day to celebrate this basic measurement. So today (10/23) starting at 6:02am, people started celebrating Mole Day.
My whole family got into it this year. My daughter, who loves to draw, designed a T-shirt for my son’s AP chemistry class to celebrate Mole Day. My son and his classmates organized a whole bunch of events. The class had a band playing, ate tons of food and blew up things in the lab all starting at 5:30am. The chemistry teacher loves to have fun with his students while teaching them. He is very passionate about his subject and his students. That passion is infectious and has transferred to my son, who loves chemistry and wants to study it in college. Read the rest of this entry »
As SaaS and Cloud Computing mature, a lot of the discussions on cost have turned to concerns oversecurity. Many people believe that implementing SaaS can save money and free up IT staff for more business critical tasks. Now security is the biggest concern about moving to SaaS.
1. Is my data is safe?
2. Will a hacker get to my information?
3. What if my service provider goes down? Read the rest of this entry »
