Synage's DeskAway, a web-based project collaboration service that provides teams a central location to easily organize, manage and track their projects and work is another widely used application. NASSCOM touted SaaS for mobile phones as the future trend as applications are taking over the medium. However, in the present context, Narasimhan (Kishore) Mandyam, CEO, Impel CRM sees it as a distant dream. "Network access is spotty, user experience is ambivalent at best and anyway, people who access Mobile Internet with a fancy phone are too small a group to call it a SaaS market. It will happen, maybe in conjunction with 4G. In the meantime, there is SaaS-via-SMS in non-American markets," he says.

SaaS has often been seen as an alternative to outsourcing. Barnes begs to differ and terms these approaches as alternatives to each other as their primary function is to minimize the cost and effort required to maintain internal IT infrastructure. He foresees the two co-existing to augment more traditional on-premise software deployments and application hosting, particularly in large organizations.

Security concerns run high for this model as often, the service providers belong to a third party. Though he agrees that the concern is justified, Raina feels that it is not an issue technically speaking as even RBI sites get hacked. "Many standards are evolving around Cloud Computing security but essentially data protection is the biggest area," says Sunny Ghosh, CEO, Wolf Frameworks. It is expected that far more emphasis will be given to regulatory compliance considerations and process visibility issues, particularly where a business process cuts across multiple, hybrid Cloud-based platforms that may include some combination of vendor-provided public Clouds, including SaaS solutions and an internally managed private Cloud. Synage's Founder and CEO Sahil Parikh says, "Consumers need to come to terms with the fact that their data is more secure with the SaaS vendor than behind their office walls. Security and data protection are closely tied to the SaaS vendors' business model and hence they take adequate steps to ensure that customer data is secured- both from the infrastructure as well as the application layers."

Mention of DeskAway and a quote from me in this article.

“A small leak can sink a great ship.”
Benjamin Franklin

This post has been inspired by my recent email conversations with David Skok of Matrix Partners. He runs an amazing SaaS blog for entrepreneurs called http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/. A must read!

To have a successful SaaS business, you need to have a leak-proof funnel. As you spend money on marketing (SEM, Banner, Blogs, Social Media) to get more people to your site, you need to also measure how many of them signup to the free trial (or free plan) and how many of those convert to a paid customer. Before you start adding more features to your app, here is what you should be measuring (use Google Analytics):

A good read for all SaaS entrepreneurs. Always keep an eye out on your funnel and conversions.

Free Tools for Startups – How to Grow without Spending in IT Infrastructure [Cloud 9]

[Guest article by Sahil Parikh, founder of DeskAway– an online project collaboration service for small businesses and teams.]

Startups are a rage in emerging economies. Look at India, China or Brazil, you will find hundreds of startups sprouting all across the country. It just has become so easy to start and market a web business (even in developing countries) – increased broadband penetration, inexpensive computers, smart-phones, easy access to the Internet, free-for-all social networking tools and above all, the availability of software tools that were either out of the reach of a small business or expensive and cumbersome to setup.

The first key metric that’s important to a company like Carbonite is “cost of acquisition.” Since the average customer only pays about $50 per year, we must contain costs associated with acquiring new customers. Even small changes in this metric can dramatically change the company’s profitability.

“Retention,” or how many customers renew their subscription from one year to the next, is the other key metric. Managing retention requires a sophisticated stream of communications with the customer to ensure he or she is happy throughout the lifecycle.

Two of the most important metrics in a SaaS company. You keep cost of acquisition low (sell online = self-service) and your customers/users happy.

Project management has entered a new era in the last few years. It is less about planning and organizing and more about collaborating and communicating. At the heart of this is using sophisticated online tools that will give disparate teams the power to organize, manage, and track their projects from anywhere. Project management tools will behave just like your social network where you communicate, plan events, and collaborate with friends and family through your Web browser. Your project team members are now just a click away!

This is an article on project management and DeskAway I wrote for a magazine in Philippines.