Customers Take the Wheel

It’s no secret there’s a sea change occurring in enterprise software, as “on-premise” increasingly gives way to “on-demand.” What’s not so evident yet is the shift in power from the vendor to the customer that is occurring as a result of the on-demand revolution. In a recent article posted on ebizQ, I discuss how the growing popularity of on-demand SaaS applications will lead to a more customer-centric and responsive software industry. This is because in the on-demand world, the customer is firmly in the driver’s seat and can pull the plug on the vendor at any time. As opposed to on-premise software implementations, on-demand implementations have no expensive infrastructures and no sunk costs that lock customers in and limit their flexibility to make a change.

Nevertheless, customers need to step warily. As more and more large enterprise software companies test out the SaaS waters with initial on-demand offerings, there’s no guarantee they will support their on-demand customers properly. After decades of locking customers into expensive on-premise software and subjecting them to lengthy implementation cycles and costly upgrades, who’s to say these companies can suddenly and successfully shift gears and become paragons of customer care?

Then there are those vendors who are trying to cash in on the on-demand cachet by offering “hosted on-demand” applications that are really just the same old on-premise applications running remotely, and which have few of the advantages of a genuine on-demand application built on a multi-tenant SaaS model. There are some rude shocks just around the corner for the customers of these guys, who by blurring the truth are setting themselves up to disappoint their clientele.

So as you slide into the driver’s seat and take the wheel in the brave new on-demand world, how do you make sure you’re not going to be fooled and are indeed going to get all the value that you expect? In the ebizQ article, I posit a brief checklist to help customers navigate the maze of on-demand claims and promises. Like any good driver, you’ll want to run down such a list before turning the key. Check out the full article here, and let me know what you think: www.ebizq.net/topics/bpm/features/8567.html