How to make SaaS CRM a success

June 2, 2008 from MyCustomer.com – “Has software as a service (SaaS) made it to the mainstream? Opinion is divided. Some of the leading voices in the SaaS market still see their outreach to the market as heavily educational and evangelical. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, argues that it can take up to 10 years before a technology makes it across Geoffrey Moore's famous 'chasm' of acceptance.

Others are more convinced that CRM SaaS at least has made it to mainstream thinking, among them Forrester Research. Forrester conducted a survey late last year of 1,017 IT decision makers and US and European firms to evaluate their opinion. The study found that nearly two thirds of those surveyed were either using or piloting SaaS offerings, with CRM the most commonly used.

180 View – We think that SaaS is mainstream for CRM. The same will happen for ERP over the next few years. One of the more interesting points in the article was “You also need to think getting a formal service-level agreement (SLA). You may find that your SaaS provider will not be eager to discuss this too closely in order to "avoid risk and responsibility when selling directly to business users.” Good luck in getting the SaaS vendors to agree to penalties. But is the risk of downtime or other problems any greater than an on premise solution when the network/server/ISP… fails?