Let’s face it. This is 2009 and IT spends are being deferred to a later date. However, the demand from IT in facilitating businesses continues to be the undiminished. In other words, expecting more from less.That means On-Demand or SaaS based applications is exactly what the doctor ordered. The challenge that CIOs face is which On-Demand solution to go for. The question is not whether, but how and who.
The big challenge is how do you compare the vendors. Price itself may not be telling the total story so cheap is not necessarily the in thing. There may not be too many reference customers. Different On-Demand CRMs for example, may have their limitations in customizability. For example, Impel CRM, that I noticed yesterday by chance, compares itself with Salesforce.com and highlights cost advantage on the parameter of customization, among other things.
Zoho CRM even offers itself free for upto 3 users. This should suffice SMEs and MSME. For example, this could suffice a one man fashion boutique . This could even suffice a two architect firm. This could suffice a doctors clinic.
This brings us to the next point which is domain knowledge. If the solution provider has little or no skill in your area of work, you could just end up in a bigger problem. You could even find yourself paying for costly customizations or completely finding the solution useless. There are reasons to believe that On-Demand is not going to work on one-size-fits-all. We would soon have industry specific solution offerings. While the solution provider would like to sell subscriptions in large numbers without little or minor customizations, the customers would like to pay as little for customizations. This should drive industry specific solutions to emerge faster.
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