Sales Performance Management

Check out a fast growing blog at the leading on-demand provider of Sales Performance Management, Xactly Corporation

http://xactlycorp.web5.hubspot.com/blog/ctl/all-posts/

Xactly customers benefit from massive scalability, longevity, broad integration and, not least, from the economies of software as a service. Check out what they’re saying about their investment in Xactly Incent.

True SaaS, or half-baked SaaS?

And why does it matter?

Bloggers, industry analysis and developers have been confusing customers with their claims of  ’belonging’ to the groundswell of On-Demand computing, or Software-as-a-Service.

Let’s be clear: if your vendor offers a true on-demand application but in parallel also offers an on-premise product, they are not true SaaS.

This matters – here’s why:

• multiple product versions means multiple code tree. Means multiply your support, training, dec services, marketing and  operational logstics by n, where n = number of parallel offerings.
• this results in greater inertia in bug fixes, enhancements, product roadmap and customer responsiveness. which results in alonger wait for good stuff to reach customers
• If you’re smaller than Oracle/SAP/Microsoft and co, then you can’t afford to maintain multiple product offerings. The non-saas versions will drag you down, you’ll never get to market ahead of your pure-saas competitors.
• as a customer of a non-pure-saas offering, you don’t get the benefits automatically – sales reps try to steer you toward their on-premise offering, as they will make so much more commission on that sales vs. monthly subscriptions

Here’s a checklist you should ask every application vendor you’re considering for implementation:

1. do they have one instance only, with all customers sharing an identical image of the code, data schemas, sharing all datacenter resources equally? NO? A true saas provider may provide a choice of upgrade dates for customers, but hese are simply virtual segmentations of the same code base, with a logical grouping a, b, and c. That’s different from single tenant offerings, which allow companies to stay on a version as long as they like, and to upgrade in their own time. Why does this matter? Your vendor’s support resources will be diluted beyond the curent version of the app, needing to support stragglers, hybrids and “stuck in time” customers. Bad for you – you need to evolve and stay current.
2. do they release minnimum 3x major releases a year? No? Dude – this is not the 90′s anymore. Companies have to stay current with new features, bug fixes,and new ideas. Imagine walking around with your 2007 iPhone…. Upgrades have to be quick, easy, effortless and free. Anything less, your vendor is not true SaaS. End of story.
3. do they persist field names, objects, API versions, forever? This matters because if they deprecate a field, you might be using it in a report, API call or other web service. When you come in Monday morning, your stuff is broken, and it wasn’t you fault – your SaaS vendor broke it. This is bad manners – tell them not to do that anymore.
4. do they offer development resources that allow you to customize, build, integrate and maintainwithout any moving parts in your building / datacenter? If you have to build libraries of API objects locally, or store mapping tables and transformation rules in a software appliance that lives “somewhere” not inside your vendor’s cloud, then somebody has missed the point. Go talk to them about their competitors.
5. do they price their products with zero lock-in? You should expect to pay the same amount every month, regardless of how much or little your usage is. Unless you upgrade/downgrade from the pricing band that you’re agreed in, there is no change, month on month. Beware of fakes, who try to charge you on actual usage, or by colume of data stored. Why does this matter? SaaS belief system says the customer’s costs are predictable, stable, and fair. IT budgets no longer need to run over or be padded for worst case scenario. Also, vendors know their projected revenues ahead of time – everyone enjoys a new and improved predictability in costs and revenues.
6. do they listen to their customers? Ah-Ha! The old school believed the software vendor knows best, so they design a best practices framework and build alot of software around the best practices. Thenthey realize they forgot about your specia needs so they built expensive customizations to handle those needs – and you paid them for that? Better idea: vendor, don’t build concrete walls; build rubber traffic cones instead. Get out of the way – let customers define their own restrictions and rules and validations. And for feature roadmaps, get out of the bpoardroom and into the blogosphere – your cuswtomers are tweeting – right now – about what would be nice to have in your next release. Oh by the way: your competitors are reading those tweets – wakey wakey…

Ok – if you didn’t already know all of this, you probably have a motorola razor and you keep paper maps in your car. But it’s OK, welcome aboard – we’re all loving this new landscape.

Running the whole company in the clouds

Most traditional IT effort ends up creating obstacles to business – it’s almost like IT doesn’t like business.

Here is a success story from inside Xactly Corp over the past year. The mission was to implement an information architecture to run the business 100% on-demand, software-as-a-service, with no components installed either in our datacenter or on individual users’ computers. (check Xactly blog)

That was July 2009. Today, we’re well on the way to realizing this ambitious vision –

Core internal processes:

• Salesforce.com – CRM and marketing automation, plus customer cases management
• Xactly Incent – sales comp and bonus/commissions management
• Zuora – subscriptions management, billing, renewals and quoting
• Workday – ERP and HRIS, plus enterprise workflow
• OpenAir – Professional Services Automation

From quote to cash, from initial lead generation, to collection of payment and recognition of revenues, we manage transactions and reporting in these cloud apps. They’re integrated using web services.

Employee desktop, productivity and communications tools:

• Google Apps – email, calendars, documents, spreadsheets and sites
• Skype, WebEx, GoToMeeting
• SaaSure – single sign-on and centralized user administration
• Box.net – centralized, cloud-based file storage and file sharing

Microsoft apps are still available when necessary but the transport vehicle is no longer Outlook, and the sharing platform is not SharePoint. This works. Period.

Supporting apps – business plug-ins and value-add extensions:

• InsideView – account insights, market intel and instant lookups
• Marketo – marketing automation, email campaigns, lead scoring
• HubSpot – blogs and links, blog-to-lead, link analytics
• Echosign – e-signature for legal documents and customer agreements

InsideView is an awesome account lookup tool, and since it’s in the cloud it doesn’t go stale or require a manual import of new info every few weeks. Marketo links elegantly into Salesforce data and its own environment to help us run elaborate marketing campaigns and track responses in a single place. HubSpot

Intelligence:

• Birst – online analytics, funnel reporting
• Adaptive Planning – budgets, forecasts, actuals comparison
• Taleo – talent onboarding, applicant tracking
• Sonar6 – employee performance management

What are the advantages?

Without going too deep into the SaaS vs. on-premise debate – version upgrades are a breeze: come in Monday morning and your whole company is on the new release. Nobody worked the weekend to babysit a conversion. There wasn’t a 6 month project to manage change across all functions in order to map old processes to new. It just happened. “Oh look, there are three new fields on the customer contacts screen”.

Secondly, costs are stable and predictable: the monthly subscription costs are known in advance and they only change when we add more seats to a license. There are no hardware emergencies, no Java J2EE / Websphere / Oracle stack to maintain, and no datacenter upgrade projects to overrule genuine business priorities.

The only IT resource is a systems administrator – closely linked with day to day operations and involved with tactical management. They don’t use Microsoft Project to tell you about a massive SDLC schedule going out many months into the future. Today they’re working on stuff that we’re going to deploy this week or next week. We will see their work in the same month the idea started in. Wow! That’s quite a concept for IT….

A strategic factor, to balance the tactical: despite all the day-to-day effort being focused on short term goals, the long term view for each product is assured by all its customers driving enhancements and innovation, together. Being able to deploy upgrades easily, ensures we don’t get stuck in time or preclude our upward compatibility because of an in-house system or a clunky customization.

Security? Absolutely! The leading on-demand providers offer security against malicious entry, data theft and malware that is better than most Fortune 500 companies’ internal infrastructures (IDC, Gartner). Disaster recover is equally superior in SaaS environments when compared with any company’s corresponding datacenter setup. Uptime too, is vastly superior to what a midsize company might hope to offer. While outages do occur – and they’re no fun – they always beat the in-house numbers, with three-nines and four-nines availability.

To sum up, it’s not just about cost savings – it’s about faster, more fluid information and business process. We freed ourselves from the traditional shackles of IT rigidity: best practices, compliance, disaster recovery, SDLC, the PMO and the enterprise portfolio management process, and, of course, all that datacenter rigmarole that puts roadblocks in the way of business.

While there is some work to do before we have it all running like a Swiss clock, we’re already reaping the benefits of agility, responsiveness, economy and durability. It already feels like success, and we’re very optimistic about the rest of the journey.