Bill,

Thanks for having me on the show, and wish we had a bit more time.  It was a pleasure talking to you, and really trying to bore into the confusions in our industry at the customer level.

As we've discussed, there are too many vendors out there with no differentiation, there's no alignment on what "SaaS" really is, and there's vendors over-promising on the breadth of their platform capabilities in the race to "do it all".  While we all want to be the first one to offer a true "end-to-end Talent Platform", we all need to also remember that the most important thing to deliver on while we try to get there is the basics that the customers really rely on TODAY; an easy-to-use software product that's fast, configurable, and backed by great customer service.  I would hazard a guess that 9 out of 10 companies leaving their existing software to look at alternatives are doing so because their existing vendor is failing on these basics....not lacking a bell-and-whistle feature, or new module that no one else has.

I feel like we only touched on some of the philosophies of SaaS that the customer should be asking about, and thought I'd leave a few more in this posting for open discussion.  I call these the "Are you truly SaaS if..."

• You offer local hosting options as well as a SaaS Model?
• You offer different platforms (source codes) for different company sizes or verticals (rather than make one platform configurable enough to suit all)?
• You've bought the pieces to Talent Management/Talent Acquisition, and maintain different product and source codes, but integrate them with web services?
• You allow the customer to customize, or you customize (ie - at cost), an individual instance of  your software, rather than just configure through an admin (ie - no cost)?
• Less than 85-90% of your revenue comes from CMRR (contracted monthly recurring revenue) that is predictable for the vendor AND the customer?

As we discussed, veering away from these tenents of SaaS will ultimately affect both the vendor and the customer, and show up in such areas as:

1. Profit margins for the vendor (beware the "we have the largest development team in the industry...")
2. Price:Value Ratios for the customer
   
3. Customer Service levels for the customer
   

Obviously a lot more to this than a radio segment and email can cover, but food for thought, and happy to continue the discussions.

Thanks again, Bill.

Colin

Colin Day

Founder & CEO

iCIMS