http://online.wsj.com/home-page

Let me know what you all think will come next, Accenture, anyone???

Jeff

Thanks very much for sharing your excellent insights. The balance between customer needs i.e. flexibility and a loathing of long term commitments is definitely at odds with the VC view of reliable revenue forecasts. You raise a really key point about switching costs and the associated grief as well which likely serves as enough of anti-churn incentive as any contract, and nothing ultimately replaces delivering on promises to your customers.

Again I really appreciate your inputs. I shoot this blog out every Thursday. Don’t be a stranger, as the dialogue is really the value.

As a small entrepreneur we dedicated ourselves to the subscription model from day one and offer our SaaS application for Supply Chain Management exclusively in this model. It just makes sense for all the reasons you noted.

I wanted to write on a couple of points that directly relate to your post. Techpreneurship is more possible now than ever before – the capital requirements to start a firm are just not there from the development infrastructure perspective. We would not exist if this was not the case. This brings new innovators to the table. As I travel I meet fellow entrepreneurs and it is very exciting to talk with them as we share stories.

Next is the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) of SaaS success know as Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue (CMRR). As this is a great indicator of future revenues and I track this myself but the drive for CMRR is diluting the SaaS promise of portability. Picking up and moving is not easy when you consider Extraction – Transformation and Loading of enterprise business information. The stickiness for customers to SaaS enterprise providers is the issue of moving their information easily. Forcing enterprises to sign multi-month / year deals seems unnecessary. But if a SaaS firms CMMR is not going through the roof how does one do valuation for the company. I read where a CIO of a major fortune 1000 firm said that until SaaS providers eliminate the multi-month / year contracts they look like on-premise solutions to him… no difference. Just something that I feel is going to gather steam with companies in the new paradigm.

Onto the Customer retention… for SaaS providers this is critical portability and on-boarding is going to get better Techpreneurship will have to include skills in customer satisfaction. This is where a company, I feel, will create the stability and valuation metrics.

Thanks again for your post… very interesting