Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Insight as a Service

Do customers using SaaS, & vendors providing SaaS gain any better insight than those using traditional methods of software delivery? The answer (surprisingly) seems to be - yes.

One of the benefits application providers accrue is insight based on information gathered across all of their customers. Application vendors can aggregate information across their various customer base to provide information on trends seen within a specific segment or a specific region. For e.g. Student Information System providers can deliver insight to their customers on student scores across subjects, and across regions. Horizontal application providers like Human Resources systems can identify compensation trends across industries and across regions.

Application Hosters can also provide information to application developers on which areas within the product were more frequently used, where customers spent the most time, and even which pages took the most time to load.

SaaS vendors also provide information on who accessed the application, when, and for how long. Such metrics can help their customers gauge the effectiveness of their SaaS application usage and usage patterns.

Finally, SaaS vendors can understand which of their customers have higher adoption rates, which ones use more modules, and which ones can benefit from additional services.

If information & insight is powerful, then SaaS packs a punch.

No comments: