Listen to my conversation with Eric Berridge, CEO of Bluewolf, one of the pioneers of a new generation of professional services companies that specialize in software-as-a-service and cloud computing.
In this podcast, learn what attracts large enterprises to SaaS, and find out why adopting SaaS can help change the culture of an organization and effect business transformation.
Listen to or download the 8:04 minute podcast below:
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PW: Eric, I'm really pleased to have you with us today, because I know that Bluewolf has got a huge amount of experience of implementing software-as-a-service in the enterprise. And actually, Eric, you've also written a book, Iterate or Die, about how software-consulting companies need to operate in the 21st century. So clearly, you've given this a lot of thought and you've got a lot of experience to tell us about.
EB: Absolutely. We've been in this space now for about ten years. In fact, we're celebrating our decade as a a professional services firm focusing on organizations that are embracing software-as-a-service in the cloud. So we're very happy to be here to talk about the industry.
Yes, and wow, you got in early on that one, didn't you?
We did. It was some blind luck and maybe a little bit of skilful forecasting. We really saw back about ten years ago that organizations were struggling with software. Around about that time, many SaaS companies were coming to market, and we looked at it as a way to really help our clients accelerate their businesses and accelerate their initiatives.
Back then, of course, people said, 'Well, SaaS, that's just for small companies.' Is that your typical customer base?
No, our customer base is actually the opposite today. As organizations like Salesforce.com have really crept up the enterprise, we have followed them. And today our customer base is mainly what we call Fortune 1000 organizations that are solving complex problems and really trying to embrace complex processes within their organizations.
And what sort of industries are we typically talking about?
We work fairly horizontally. But if you look at where we have the majority of our customers, they fall within the media space, within the banking space, and within the high-tech space. And that's on a global basis.
And is it mainly Salesforce that you're implementing?
I would say, for many of our customers, they use Salesforce as the foundation for their SaaS strategy. But we work with a host of other SaaS applications and platforms like Google and Amazon to help organizations that need more flexibility and openness as they embrace a global SaaS strategy.
So in your experience, why are big companies like this opting for software-as-a-service? Do they feel it's going to give them a big payback from a cost point-of-view, or is it a way of getting more mundane improvements? Is it big impact or small impact?
I think it's big impact, and I think you're seeing more and more organizations embrace it for the ROI that they can now measure out of these applications. There are a lot of reasons to look at SaaS and go to SaaS. One obvious one is just time-to-market and what we call time-to-value. In the SaaS world, you can roll out new processes and new technologies much quicker than you could in the premise-based world.
But I think more importantly, organizations are finding that the right SaaS solutions are extremely flexible, and you can iterate your business processes as an organization so that you don't have to get all of your requirements identified perfectly upfront. And our long-term customers have really found that; where they started out with something like Salesforce early on and laid a basic foundation, but now have built processes and processes on top of that foundation in very short increments and sprints.
I think the other key factor is, it allows organizations to experiment, because the cost of getting it wrong in the SaaS world is so much lower than the cost of getting it wrong in the old software world.
So does that impact the role of IT?
It does impact the world of IT. And I think the way it impacts the world of IT is, the need from the IT organization is less around the technology. And the need now is more around an IT organization that understands the business process; an IT organization that can truly partner with the business, and understand the optimal way of processing transactions, or executing on business processes within an organization.
Do you need to be a particular kind of business to take advantage of this? Because in the old days, people in an enterprise didn't expect to be able to be fleet-of-foot in the way that they organized their processes. This ability to make small changes rapidly and to fine tune, to do the iterative development, is fairly new isn't it?
Yeah, big time. And it's interesting, because we see a lot of what I'll call old-school organizations using SaaS as the catalyst to actually promote organizational change in their own companies. So we see manufacturers that will all of a sudden use SaaS to leapfrog their competition from a cultural perspective, because it promotes this notion of experimentation, and it promotes this notion of what we call agile business transformation. To your point, the culture needs to come along with the technology from that perspective.
Okay. But in a sense, you're working with companies that are using SaaS as part of the business transformation. They're actually becoming a new kind of company, in part because of their access to software-as-a-service and the kind of development and process change that it enables.
Absolutely. Yeah, 100 percent. Where we focus a lot of our time, is not only on getting the application right, but also in getting the organization ready for the application and promoting the value of this iterative world, where you don't have to wait a year to get something from IT, you can get it within 30 to 60 days. That creates a whole new mindset within a company.
Yeah, that certainly I think can be quite revolutionary. And actually, IT people can be surprised at the impact it has on how they're perceived in the organization can't they?
Absolutely.
So if you could give one single piece of advice to anyone considering SaaS for their organization #151; have you got a piece of advice you could give them?
We have a lot of advice we can give, Phil. I'll try to distill it down to a couple of things. I think the first thing is, if you're looking at SaaS for the first time, it's important to get over the traditional hang-ups that you might think are the important things #151; like security and scalability, and all the reasons why organizations sometimes refrain from looking in this direction. And those things are really taken care of.
The other thing I would say is that, use SaaS as a mechanism to centralize your data. Because as flexible as SaaS is, we don't believe that the right approach is to just bring in a bunch of SaaS applications into an organization and manage a portfolio of disparate SaaS applications. In that world, you still have to manage integration, which isn't any easier. So look at this as an opportunity to centralize your data.
And I think lastly, and probably most importantly, it's important to realize that just because software-as-a-service brings more flexibility and more ease-of-use, it still requires a resource commitment. And it still requires that, as an organization, you have a center of excellence that you rely on to promote the change and to own the application as it matures within your company. Those are the three things that I think are important to consider.
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