| Typical SaaS Operation |
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Your Typical SaaS Operations (copied from Dani's Perpective on SaaS)
[...]
Company Profile:
Name: YTSC (Your Typical SaaS Company)
Age: 3-4 years in the making.
Staff: between 20-40 people, possibly a small dev team offshore in Southeast Asia or one of the former Soviet
Union republics.
Technology: Being relatively fresh, YTCS technology is multi-tenant, customer-centric, with (hopefully) an
automatic customer on-boarding mechanism, and they surely have an integration with Salseforce.com (or
perhaps NetSuite, SugarCRM, MSDynamics, etc.). Some fancy configuration capabilities should be built into
the product and Web Services integration options are available.
Platform: most probably a LAMP shop. Let’s start with all the free stuff and hope to reach profitability before
loading the heavy guns. And, hey, we’re big advocates of open-source.
Sales force Compensation: Hmm, we read all the papers, attended the webinars. We think we’re getting it
right, but why does the Sales department feel like Grand Central Station?
Customers: A lot of mom & pop shops, a bunch of WEB 2.0 companies with flamboyant logos, a number of
departmental customers with big names that we flash on our web site.
Profitability: Surely by next year.
YTSC is now poised for accelerated growth. The customers seem to like the service and the price, and it
looks like the numbers will grow rapidly; at least this is what YTSC’s newly acquired VP of Sales has
projected.
So how is YTSC prepared for this rapid growth? Do they have the People, Practices and Programs (P-cube) in
place? Are they ready to scale from dozens of customers to hundreds and, hopefully, thousands?
My guess is NO. Let me think about that for a moment… Naw.
[...]
Company Profile:
Name: YTSC (Your Typical SaaS Company)
Age: 3-4 years in the making.
Staff: between 20-40 people, possibly a small dev team offshore in Southeast Asia or one of the former Soviet
Union republics.
Technology: Being relatively fresh, YTCS technology is multi-tenant, customer-centric, with (hopefully) an
automatic customer on-boarding mechanism, and they surely have an integration with Salseforce.com (or
perhaps NetSuite, SugarCRM, MSDynamics, etc.). Some fancy configuration capabilities should be built into
the product and Web Services integration options are available.
Platform: most probably a LAMP shop. Let’s start with all the free stuff and hope to reach profitability before
loading the heavy guns. And, hey, we’re big advocates of open-source.
Sales force Compensation: Hmm, we read all the papers, attended the webinars. We think we’re getting it
right, but why does the Sales department feel like Grand Central Station?
Customers: A lot of mom & pop shops, a bunch of WEB 2.0 companies with flamboyant logos, a number of
departmental customers with big names that we flash on our web site.
Profitability: Surely by next year.
YTSC is now poised for accelerated growth. The customers seem to like the service and the price, and it
looks like the numbers will grow rapidly; at least this is what YTSC’s newly acquired VP of Sales has
projected.
So how is YTSC prepared for this rapid growth? Do they have the People, Practices and Programs (P-cube) in
place? Are they ready to scale from dozens of customers to hundreds and, hopefully, thousands?
My guess is NO. Let me think about that for a moment… Naw.