Haut Tech

People say that marketing for “cloud services” are really over the top right now – selling a lot more promise than can be delivered. If that’s true, social media is somewhere out in the stratosphere of hype – pushed into orbit by leaders like Twitter and Facebook – I’ve heard many people say if they were trying to avoid reading yet another article on the wonders of connecting to “communities” on the web.

In our first two podcasts for Haut Tech Conversations we covered service and pricing. Both subjects are critical for SaaS businesses to consider and understand in the context of their product. In the podcast we did yesterday, we went into yet another critical area – Marketing!

Pricing services – how do you do it? Is there a rational process? Can you tie it to value? Cost? Developing a price is one of trickiest parts putting a new service online. Prospective customers have to believe the value can be realized and existing customers must find the value exceeds the subscription. A monthly subscription is easier for prospects to swallow but a yearly provides a bigger hit for cash flow and maybe higher retention. Which is better in the long run?

In this article we’re picking up where we left off in Part 1 on our expansion of the podcast we did with Steve Plunkett, CTO of Servitizer and our panel of industry experts – Luis Aburto, CEO of Scio Consulting, Mikael Blaisdell of MBlaisdell & Associates and Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures. If you haven’t read the first part of our series already – please start there – because the background for the conversation is there.

The question I pose in the title of this article is the theme of the podcast we did this month for Haut Tech Conversations. It turned out to be quite a conversation and you can download it and listen to it in its entirety here. Our panel and guest brought up so many excellent points that I’m going to take the time to summarize and extend them in this “post interview” so they are not lost.

This month on Haut Tech Conversations we kick off our series of best practice shows with a look at the core feature of SaaS, Cloud and on-demand applications – Service. As we explored in our last article, we’re going to discuss how current vendors are dealing with their service offerings, what is often lacking, and what is on the part of the vendors and the industry as a whole.

Although in reality, business services provided through the Internet are nothing new, the number and breadth of services now available is certainly worthy of note. As a Gartner report recently noted – we are most likely at the peak of the hype cycle which in “Gartner speak” leads to the “slope of enlightenment” and eventually to mainstream adoption in the enterprise.