Evolution of Software as a Service (SaaS)

Dennis has a great new story this morning ( at 03:10 am ?) about “Sandhill Talks SaaS 2.0″. He also comments on my feelings toward SaaS. And he is quite right to say:

I’m pretty sure Stefan Topfer, CEO at Winweb would agree. His company’s offering sees accounting as a utility that underpins the business but which of itself is of little intrinsic value other than a necessary means of achieving compliance. Instead, he’s creating an infrastructure to support early stage business.

I am looking at this from a different perspective. All I care about is “client mortality”, the advantages of the SaaS model are enormous, but can be improved upon.

How do most small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses start? You have an idea, then what? As if it is not enough to deal with your idea you need to worry about all kinds of admin functions to run any kind of business. That is were WinWeb comes in, we are trying to provide:

• A on-demand, online IT infrastructure (SaaS), that will enable to set you up to run your small business with in minutes, at a very low cost, so you can “try” your business idea for a month, a year, whatever. You do not need a bank loan or quit your job (in some cases, you will have to) to find out if your idea is worth it. If it is not, then you go back to the drawing board and try again later. No problem since you have no contract with us that logs you in with us.
• But most importantly of all, we use our SaaS model to have you not only work with colleagues anywhere @ anytime in real time, but also with your accountant. Now here is the thing, most of us when we started our small business did not know the first thing about accounting, financial planning, and when and when NOT (that’ll be me then) to buy that BMW 530i. Your accountant, if it’s a good one, will not only tell you but explain it to you, so you grow from someone with an idea to a “business” someone with an idea.
• The same is true for other “Virtual Assistants“: Call answering, bookkeeping, typing, credit control, etc. There are so many dedicated professional people out there, mainly working from home. There is no way you could hope, as a small business, to employ even one of these skill sets full-time, unless they are important to the core business. With our SaaS model you can time-share these specialists at a very low hourly rate.

The combination of the SaaS model with our Live! services provides a low cost, well looked after (accountant), and very versatile business infrastructure that does lower new business mortality rates and lowers barrier for business start-up.

BTW, I read a great post the “Entrepreneurship Gap” yesterday. Here you can find some ideas about starting up in business that I like.

Accounting, Bookkeeping, Business Development, Business Infrastructure, Business Start Up, CPAs, Finance, On-demand, Outsourcing, SaaS, sme-blog, Software as a Service, Virtual Assitants, Web Technology, WinWeb

9 Responses to “ Evolution of Software as a Service (SaaS) ”

1. Jason Holden
   
   Said on May 9th, 2006 at 9:32 am

   We (Holden Associates) are as Stefan knows in the process of rolling out winweb to all existing clients, and, now this is the easy part, we are also making it a condition of new clients that they use winweb and in return we help support their business in real time.

   The interesting thing about that is, most other accountants who say ‘oh no my client is used to Sage etc.’, well how do you explain that we are moving clients off a static version of Sage on their PC and onto winweb with all the benefits of our real-time support without any complaints, after all they are guided by their accountants advice not the other way round– so lets be honest the barrier is not the clients, it is the accountants who feel safe with Sage etc., clients don’t care!

   But hey, they longer other accountants stick with Sage etc., the better for my practice.

   The article in Entrepreneurship Gap is very interesting and actually supports what we are seeing, of the recent new clients intake in the last few months so far all have been under the age of 30; of those in the last 12 months only a few have been over the age of 40; it would appear people are starting their own businesses early, and why not, there is no reason to remain employed on low year increments with your job security at the hands of the man at the top, if you have an idea and want to take it forward go for it, find a good accountants/business advisor and use the infrastructure of winweb and enjoy the ride!

2. Emily Coltman
   
   Said on May 9th, 2006 at 3:07 pm

   I’m under 30, do I count?!

   Seriously I think Jason is right – we’re about to put our first client on to Winweb. I’ve always kept his books, but he’ll now get the chance to look at them over the internet and particularly see which customers haven’t paid him.

   Also, if a client can use Sage, he/she can use Winweb! I taught myself to use Winweb with help from the on-line chat system (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think that help system is brilliant). OK I’m an ACA. But if a client already knew his/her way round Sage, then with a bit of coaching from the accountant and making use of Winweb’s help system, they shouldn’t have any problems using Winweb.

   Something else I’ve noticed is that clients love free software. Offer them something free and watch their eyes light up!

   M

3. Stefan Töpfer
   
   Said on May 9th, 2006 at 5:05 pm

   I am pleased that you like the help system, we always believed that a live help system would be best. From our own experience we know that manuals are not often used, and can also be frustrating for clients to use.

   Thank you for your input.

4. THE SMALL BUSINESS BLOG » Blog Archive » Accountant type - bookkeeper accountant or business advisor accountant?
   
   Said on May 10th, 2006 at 10:09 am

   [...] In response to my recent post “Evolution of Software as a Service (SaaS)”, Jason Holden made a comment that caught my attention: …. The interesting thing about that is, most other accountants who say ‘oh no my client is used to Sage etc.’, well how do you explain that we are moving clients off a static version of Sage on their PC and onto winweb with all the benefits of our real-time support without any complaints, after all they are guided by their accountants advice not the other way round– so lets be honest the barrier is not the clients, it is the accountants who feel safe with Sage etc., clients don’t care! …… [...]

5. Emily Coltman
   
   Said on May 11th, 2006 at 12:02 pm

   I’ve just been to visit a client who’s on Sage version 12 and needed a service pack installed to make the bank rec work properly. We have clients on about 6 different versions of Sage and unless we do the bookkeeping in house, keeping track of who’s using what version, and who’s got what service packs loaded, can be a real pain.

   Whereas if they had been on Winweb, I would know exactly what version everyone’s on, because they’re all on the same!!

   M

6. Stefan Töpfer
   
   Said on May 11th, 2006 at 12:20 pm

   Emily,

   Great point. Not only no upgrade hassle for the client, always on the latest version, no “we do not support this version anymore” syndrome and the updates are free.

   What else could we do for your clients?

   )

7. THE SMALL BUSINESS BLOG
   
   Said on May 11th, 2006 at 1:45 pm

   SME / SMB Have Become Obsolete Acronyms

   SAP, Oracle may consider a $100-200M million business small, but it really is midsized, the “M” in SME, with a few hundred employees and a dedicated IT department that will likely need help with software implementation, but will cope with t…

8. SMB / SME Have Become Obsolete Acronyms| Zoli’s Blog
   
   Said on October 23rd, 2007 at 3:22 pm

   [...] of running a business. This category needs more help than just technology, and vendors like WinWeb are experimenting with a unique combination of hosted software as well as “Live” [...]

9. Naseer
   
   Said on September 8th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

   Which one is the best Accounting software for SMEs…

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