All SaaS Enterprise (ASE)

“All SaaS Enterprise” or ASE is a topic of this coming weeks SaaS Summit in Monterey hold by Tier1Research. Since I’m speaking on a panel there, I thought it might be interesting to all of you who may not be able to come to read how our All SaaS Enterprise evolved.

Still today – we [Xeequa] do not run any major business applications internally. How ever there is some need here and there to have access to data in an off-line manner. I’ll talk about that here too. This is more then a typical blog post – it’s almost a white paper, but what the heck.

The way we selected products was not very scientific and it was NOT under the idea it has to be SaaS. We simply tried to identify the best possible solution for our needs with a high degree of flexibility for growth and the least amount of work to deploy.
Now: here is the list of applications we are using today:

Office Products:
Those are every bodies desktop tools.

Calendar: Google
We switched to Google Calendar simply because it was super easy and we could avoid installing a local server such as Exchange. Also with no hassle like installing secure tunnels (VPN) everybody can access the calendar from anywhere, any time.

Offline Calendar: Calgoo
But, sometimes there is need for fast and synchronized calendar access when you are in the road and have no internet access. We choose Calgoo which very easily and automatically synchs up with the Google calendar once internet is available. And we realized another cool behavior of SaaS applications: If we decide to go with some other front-end tool. We can simply go ahead and do so. No worries about our what ever current data, server, compatibility, infra… jade jade jade

Spreadsheets: Google
Clearly MS Excel has thousands of features Google doesn’t have and if one needs to do very complex multi dimensional calculations, Google may not be the first choice. But all we do is calculate pricing, do our business plan and other ordinary tasks. But there is one thing that was so much more important than all the features: sharing a spreadsheet in real-time. I can sit in a hotel room and work on the price list while somebody from my team does exactly the same and I see every click and every price change and it’s implication within half a second. We couldn’t do that as easily even if we would sit next to each other.

Documents: Google
The Google Spreadsheet inspired us to use the rest of the Google documents, replacing Word. Even so in many cases it is important to share documents but if we write a very simple letter – we actually use our email client and print it out.

Presentations: PowerPoint
We found several online versions to create presentation sets but they are all to slow, hard to use and just not as good as PowerPoint. There is no reason why we shouldn’t use PPT going forward. As I said – it doesn’t has to be online. But we realized most of our apps are actually not only easier to maintain in an on-demand version but also more powerful. PPT is one exception.

Mail: Thunderbird and Outlook
That some of us choose Thunderbird over Outlook was more a “technology religious” question than anything else to be quite honest. Outlook does it’s job if you are not depending on Exchange. So we have both. But with less usage since we don’t use the calendar or the contacts in outlook any more.

Notepads, gadgets etc. Google Personalized homepage
Then there is a ton of gadgets we find on Google and many of us use a variety of them. Is absolutely obvious in our own organization: Google is displacing Microsoft piece by piece. We are now exploring Google Apps for Enterprise (beta).

Business Applications
I remember a year go people saying ERP is probably the only application that just doesn’t make sense online. Well – I don’t think so, not any more. We just signed up with Quicken Online and it is very cool. For sure it is not SAP and we are a small team but when it comes to share data with our outsource bookkeeping, have our tax attorney access our records and do some bookkeeping or business planning from home – wow nothing can beat this.

Bookkeeping: QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online Edition is easy to sign up and use and most importantly like in many other cases, no issues with setup, servers, compatibility, no data backup worries or software update concerns. We just use it what it is for: bookkeeping.

Banking: All Online, Bank of America
BoA’s online banking is known as one of the best. Now we also use it for the business and find it super simple to deal with. Nothing to learn, we just use it.

Payroll: Bank of America’s online payroll service
An interesting development within BoA can be seen when you look at their online services that go beyond electronic banking but also moves into things like payroll. We are currently evaluating it and will compare it with ADP which is probably one of the oldest SaaS companies on the planet.

Customer/Partner relations: Xeequa
Of course we use our own product for customer relations management, partner management and business networking. Similar to the example with Google, Xeequa has not nearly as many features as Siebel or SalesForce.com but it is much easier and has one advantage again like Google, we can do something we can’t do with any other tool: we network and share opportunities with anybody in the world and don't have to worry about getting the data there and know immediately any changes in opportunity status or forecasts.

Web conferencing: Webex
For conferencing over the internet Webex became not only the leading brand but also a common verb: “we webex” It is the most simple way to conference over the internet and with the latest pricing schema also the most cost effective – we found. There may be others out there but also here, there is one thing we like about Webex most – it always works.

Webcasts: BrightCove
To do web casts or video casts is still not so easy. But we found a cool solution called BrightCove. We’ll put it up on our site in a few weeks and use it to communicate video content without running our own server or the other extreme: put it up on You Tube.

HR Research: LinkedIn
When we research for people and their background, LinkedIn is our first choice. I’m LinkedIn use no. 8,000 something and I hired quite some people through linkedin. A must in our business application collection.

Recruiting: Jobster, Monter…
When it comes to hiring the – now – classic methods are the above sites and we use them. When I write this line I just realized that I had to do news paper ads just about 10 years ago to advertise an opening.

HR, Marketing Tools and other stuff
In addition to what we are using, there are now close to 1,000 on-demand applications for pretty much every business aspect. See Tanooma.com

Infrastructure:
This is backend software which is typically “owned” by It and the most controversial discussed issue in most organizations when it comes to IT.

eMail server: SmarterMail
We simply run SmarterMail that has everything we need when it comes to email management. It’s a classic POP3 server with all the tools to setup users, groups, aliases etc. It is hosted with one of the hosting providers we use so also here we don not worry about anything when it comes to infrastructure technology.

Data Backup: XDrive (online)
Since we do not run any internal data servers, we also have nothing to backup – in theory. But there is still stuff like PPT files and a lot of little things that reside on local hard drives. So we simply use XDrive as a backup service. 5 GByte per person is just massive when we have all our mission critical files backed up by the service providers we use.

Phone: Skype and Vonage (both IP phone)
Even today there is a huge demarcation line between the people who “own” the phone equipment within a corporation and IT. Here we just don’t have any of them. We use Skype and Vonage (Business Edition) and have all the reports and everything we need to manage again online. The box that connects the lines is about the same size as a little 4 port router.

Video conferencing: Skype
Video conferencing a few years ago was a $100,000+ investment. Plus you had to have a special room and even then it wasn’t always working. Today we use Skype, have a $35 camera on our LCD screens and do world wide conference calls any time with virtually anybody for free.

A variety of hosting services
Now something else has changed. We have a variety of hosting services we use. We host our domain name with 1and1, our mail server with another hoster, our production servers with yet another hosting provider and all the providers our services providers are using. Do we worry about who owns our data and about security and what ever else people may worry? Not really. All we know is that 80+% of data fraud come from within an enterprise, so we reduced that risk by 400%. We also know that missing backups cause a lot of trouble because internally the organization is not as fit as a professional hosting service – we reduced that risk. Of course we look who we host with – but it is so much more secure and robust compared to an internal solution.

IM (Information Management) 2007
Since we don’t deal with lots of technology but with ever more data we call it IM (Information Management) instead of IT (Information Technology.