Had an interesting conversation with Juergen Biffar, co-founder and technical guru at German imaging and DM specialist DocuWare the other day. His company has just committed $1 million Euros, in addition to its regular R&D budget, over two years to development of Web-based technologies. Half of this money is committed to SaaS development, which Biffar views as an important method of delivering software in the future. He is taking the attitude that SaaS competition is going to come from start-ups and other people, like Google even, who are not in the DM industry today.
He said one of DocuWare’s board members commented that it has been said that it is impossible for a vendor of traditional software to make the successful transition to SaaS, to which Biffar replied that he plans to be part of the first one. Our discussion led to trying to come up with successful SaaS ventures aside from Salesforce.com. Of course, companies like Digitech and Filebound have had some success in our industry, and we recently talked with a Web-capture ISV, CAPSYS, that said about half its new sales are SaaS-oriented. Anyhow, going over my notes led me to a Google search on “SaaS success stories,” which yielded this article detailing one analyst’s ideas on why traditional software vendors have trouble succeeding at SaaS and what they need to do. I thought it might prove useful to some of my readers.
Happy trails.
Ralph
