iPlanWare Project Management Blog

As I have mentioned in a previous post, most software vendors either take a SaaS or an on premises approach to software deployment. Very rarely do they offer both and I have never understood the sense in this.

Here is another commentator exploring this further by looking at iPlanWare, SurarCRM and Wavemaker in particular.

The often given reason is that trying to coexist the two approaches causes issues with software releases, marketing etc.

We have been offering TeamWorks as a SaaS and on premises solution since 2001 and have regularly shipped 3-4 big releases each year since.

Get your processes right and you can offer both - and secure a huge competitive advantage as well.

My advice to a start up thinking about going pure SaaS is don’t - you will be cutting out a huge segment of the market. At least 30% of the organisations we engage with would not consider a SaaS solution. More to the point, the ones who would not consider a SaaS solution are typically larger organisations with bigger budgets.

At least another 20% will consider SaaS, but the sale will be a lot tougher due to legal issues, contracts and the customer not being familiar with the procurement / buying process for SaaS.

I agree, some software products only make sense as a SaaS solution. But for most business applications that is not the case.

So there you have it - pure SaaS can mean 50% lost sales.

Yes things will change, SaaS and cloud will become the norm - but we are a little way from that yet.

Business of software, SaaS cloud computing, on premises, SaaS, software, software as a service, start up

Every couple of weeks we get contacted by someone asking if our project management software TeamWorks is free (of charge). When I politely tell them that actually no, it is not free they always seem a bit disgruntled.

So, after I explain that our employees have bills to pay, kids to feed and our salaries are paid because we charge for software…. I then start explaining further why our software is not free - and that software that appears “free” is not.

1. “Free” software started as a matter of liberty and not of price and this point is well summarised here. Free means free to fix, augment and share things back with the community. If you are not going to do this, then why not contribute money to the free software foundation.
2. Everything has a cost. Freeware has ended up costing something to someone, somewhere down the line.
3. Companies like iPlanWare invest a substantial amount of time and money in their products. Good design costs and we have to pay for our R&D somehow.
4. Software needs supporting. I don’t mean just bug fixes but general help with the software - “how do I do?” type questions. Who is going to support the freeware you use? This is exactly why organisations like sugarcrm offer a “commercial open source” option. When you investigate the pricing of commercial “paid” freeware you quickly realise it is going to cost you the same as regular paid software.
5. With freeware you have the option to fix and augment the software yourself. But are you really going to do this? Or are you just going to use it? If so refer back to point 1.

I have a couple of builders quoting me for a new extension at the moment. Perhaps I will ask them if they would build it for free. No wait a minute, next time someone asks me if our software is free, I will tell them yes, if you give us some of your organisations products or time to the same value for free. Seems fair?

I should stress, I have nothing against freeware and use quite a few freeware products myself. In fact this blog is created using freeware. And in thanks I have answered quite a few questions posted by Wordpress users to problems we have also encountered.

Business of software, Commercials, TeamWorks Add new tag, freeware, freeware is not free, iplanware, project management software, TeamWorks