As said in my previous blog “SaaS the Best Fit for SMB’s”,  SaaS has being an increasingly adopted tool for small businesses.  SaaS is a concept that allows you to “Consume” software on a subscription basis as a “Service”,  instead of the traditional expensive model.

There are a number of benefits to be gained from the SaaS platform for both small business and individual users and this article reveals the “Take Aways” and the best of the reasons/benefits for switching to a SaaS solution for your software needs.

• Anytime Anywhere Access:

One of the greatest advantages of SaaS Application is the freedom it provides you in terms of where and when you choose to work or access the application data stored. It’s the providers business to deliver seamless access of application to their clients anytime, anywhere increasing the overall productivity. Also the service provider ensures that the data is safer than it would be if it was to be stored on your computer.

• Automatic Upgrades:

One will always have the latest version whenever you access your SaaS applications, because there is always only one version available all time.  This also means that the service provider is capable of quickly making changes within matter of hours if an error is found d in the software without causing any impact to your business.

• Cost Effectiveness:

We know that finding the right solution also means finding one that makes economic sense for your business. With SaaS model deployment,  software is subscribed and not purchased. Therefore expenses are not front loaded (Zero Capex) and are made up of predictable monthly fees. The biggest cost savings actually come from the reduction in manpower and the IT resources (servers, databases etc) required maintaining the applications in-house. There are also considerable savings from other areas such as reduced or no implementation, up-gradations costs.

• Customizable Interface:

Leveraging the power of Software as a Service (SaaS),  you can customize IT to fit your business  rather than fitting your business to what the software can provide.  The ability to modify functionality and processes in SaaS applications are more quickly and in a more iterative way than the traditional software model and specifically tailored to meet your preferences. This also means that the Business can operate more efficiently and align their process strategically to seize more competitive advantage.

• Not Platform Specific:

It does not matter whether the computer you are using runs on MAC, Windows or Linux, as long as you are able to use a browser and access the internet then you can access your  SaaS application with a fewer clicks. The majority of SaaS applications are not browser specific. This also makes it far easier to switch platforms if one desires.

Overall, SaaS model offers you rapid deployment, enterprise-class functionality and reliability, all-inclusive of maintenance and upgrades and a reduced burden on your IT resources — all at a low subscription price!!! These are huge knock-on effects of adopting SaaS solutions.  Software as a Service (SaaS) is the future of business application software, Empower your business by adopting SaaS applications !!!

About Impel CRM:

Impel CRM is an integrated CRM solution that lets you put your customer at the center of your business. Available in different editions, covering every aspect of sales force automation, marketing automation, customer service automation. Its comprehensive functionality is built to accelerate sales. Enriched by features like sales activity planning, E2E consumer marketing, SMS integration, and Call Center Management makes Impel CRM an empowered and easy to deploy on-demand CRM solution.

For more information, Please visit http://www.impelcrm.in

One of the most important features of any decent SaaS offering is the level of “configurability” it has. Tomes have been written about how Salesforce has taken this “configurability” into “PaaS” – effectively a programming tool-kit from a “no-software” company. My competitor-driven-sarcasm notwithstanding, it is true that everyone from a2zapplications to zoho has a high degree of configurability. The usual things that users look for – a menu structure that they can rename, filters that they can rebuild, fields that they can rearrange and so on – are all available in most of these apps, as they are in Impel, too.

Specifically in Impel, though – you knew this plug was coming! – we’ve taken such configuration further than most apps we’ve seen. At a user level, pretty much everything you see on screen is driven via configuration – menu-item names, field labels, whether and where a field should appear for a user, field-groupings, etc. But where we begin to move away from the pack is the ability to define “live” items at various levels of navigation. As a simple example, consider the “By stage” menu item: it actually lists the stages that the company has set up for itself – that’s not in the menu, that’s in the Stage table. The same thing happens with the “By Type” mechanism – add a new type to the company and bingo, it automatically appears on your menu. And, when you click on a specific type, it shows you items of that type, no sweat.

A more complex example of such configuration-based design is the custom logic that can be configured for specific sub-menu items. Basically, we can configure what links appear on a given page and, more importantly, what such a link does in a given context. For example, let’s say you decide that, in your organization, tickets can only be added to organizations that have a support contract in place. To implement this, apart from various other ways to get to add a ticket, users would then see a “New Ticket” link only on accounts that have a contract in place – the link would not appear at all for other accounts. This “live link” thus senses the presence of a support contract for the account as it loads up on screen and, if found, would show up, else not.

The flip side of this configurability is that rolling out new releases for custom-configured customers becomes that much more complex. The most important issue is to not “step on” someone’s configuration. When we roll out a new release, for example, the functions that the new release brings have to dovetail with the various configurations that we’ve made for specific customers. Our better-known competitors don’t have this problem, since they don’t support the high levels of custom configuration that we do. There’s no way to add a “live link”, so they don’t need to worry about that when they roll out a new release. For us, every little link is “live” and we could potentially kill it in rolling out the next great release of Impel CRM. Not a pretty sight, so we have mechanisms to manage that, too. We can therefore make a neat little combination of custom configurations with periodic releases. Throw in the complications of custom forms and processes that we do for some customers and you have a fairly volatile situation. The reason it all works in our case is not because we use lots of duct-tape and patience but because pretty much everything you see on screen is coming from some corner of our vast database. And that database is very well designed, I have to point out. That’s what gives us the ability to take our SaaS offering well beyond the one-size-fits-all model to a “live” model.

All I’ve talked about here is configuration, not customization. Customization is a whole different thing – for that, we use zeroCode, the software development framework that Impel is built on. One of these days (when my tech self overcomes my sales-y side!), I’ll talk about how we use that for custom work and to build more functions.

This recent post by Phil Wainewright, about the various “degrees” of multi-tenancy kind of got to me. The way I read it, Phil’s classification of multi-tenancy completely rejects the idea of separate schemata or separate databases for each customer, implying that the only “true” multi-tenancy architecture is when the app AND the database are common across customers. Phil even goes so far as to label as a “lesser form of multi-tenancy” those architectures where schemata are not shared but separate. That bothers me: why would the other architectures be any “lesser” (if, indeed, “lesser” implies “not so good”)? The classification may be completely “purist”, so much so that it is inapplicable to business software. It may also be that, as a pseudo-technical manager in a software business, I know little or nothing about the theoretical background of multi-tenancy. But lack of knowledge has never limited me from being opinionated! Particularly when our own architecture is clearly of the “lesser” kind.
Ah, I’ve let the cat out of the bag: I’m irritated because our own brand of multi-tenancy is termed “lesser” by someone who is more knowledgeable than I am. But then, I take comfort in the fact that customers love this mechanism of ours. A favourite question from prospects is “Mera data kahan baithega?” And if we said “Sabke saath”, we’re out on the street faster than you can say “multi-tenancy”. The way Impel OnDemand works, every customer has their own database (or schema, in Oracle), while the app itself is one large thing running across multiple servers. The technology automatically figures out the correct database for the logged-in user and sends his/her transactions to that database. All the databases are identical in structure, but different on content. Since the technology is also multi-threaded and thread-safe, users not only get great security but also terrific scalability. And we save big bucks on the hosting and the database software licensing, since we need fewer servers. Everybody’s happy.
But the “lesser” still rankles. Phil, can you please use a “less” negative word next time?!

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the most sought after application in today’s Sales and Marketing World.

And what is CRM?

Wikipedia describes CRM “as a customer-centric business strategy with the goal of maximizing profitability revenue and customer satisfaction.”

Gone are the days when bits and pieces of paper and excel worksheets were maintained to track the sales process.

Sales people have torn their hair or lost their cool trying to search for pieces of paper where they had written telephone numbers or names of people/companies.Excel sheets have visited Recycle bins and caused confusions.

No wonder the need of the hour is Customer Relationship Management.

In today’s competitive world of technology and fast moving business standards,maintaining and holding on to your customers became absolutely necessary.The need for CRM is growing and companies offering CRM have mushroomed. CRM Solutions build profitable relationships with their customers. With CRM you can increase revenue, acquire new customers and keep existing close to home. And that is definitely what companies are looking at today.

The best is yet to come. You really don’t need to be computer savvy or go into technicalities, infact you just don’t need to be an IT guy to use CRM. What you only need is an internet connection. Isn’t that a big advantage?

“Web analytics” – The process of analyzing the behavior of visitors to a Web site. Web analytics enables a business to attract more visitors, retain or attract new customers for company’s products, or to increase the traffic to the website which would in turn increase the company revenue.

Web analytics is definitely a numbers game and one that tends to spin out of control if not monitored and tailored to reveal that specific data. This is indicative of how visitors come to our site not only to locate us, but also, how and what they read on our site. For example, how many unique visitors exit from a landing page? How many visitors visited the products and services page or the time spent on the said page etc.?

In other words, it is a place where we get a variety of information gathered from each user footprint that happens upon our website.

There are a number of inexpensive software programs. “http://www.google.com/analytics/” Google Analytics is an example that is very simple to use, with fewer features than most others available for purchase in the market around the World Wide Web.

Every company should follow web analytics program in order to understand the traffic patterns and visitors behavior in respect to individual web page content. The greater the number of visitors to a web page, the greater the chances for success through awareness around the world.

I have been tracking my website”http://www.zerocode.com/” zeroCode on Google and yahoo analytics and find that every now and then I have to make changes based on the visitors coming to my site and ofcouse their interests with us.

Most of us don’t really use the data as it should be or can be utilized. We generally look at basic stats like visits and pageviews, but very rarely do we realize and analyze things such as click streams or funnels that would help us improve our site. More focus should be on the keywords, the clicks coming from various steams etc,

While going through some of the articles on the Web Analytics, I came across a very interesting book by “http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/“Avinash Kaushik called “http://webanalyticshour.com/web_analytics_an_hour_a_day_book_reviews.shtml““Web Analytics: An Hour A Day” that discuss the following points:

With analytics we can start tracking and analyzing internal search queries (Like what actually they were looking for on the sites; what are they interested? whether they want to buy a product? Or want a demo or any other information) that users make so that you can qualify who they are, where are they from and how we can modify our site to increase the conversion rate.

Understanding customer behavior is never an easy thing and with tons of data; it can be overwhelming to try and understand the customers. By taking the raw data and segmenting it we can get a better understanding of the visitors.

Analytics can also be used for reporting purpose.

Once the analysis is done on the site, we should develop a plan of action for how we’re going to improve the site. For example, if we find a very popular entry page that we were unaware of, we might consider adding more links to some new documents on the site from that page. Or if we see that many of our customers get to the home page and then leave, we know we should work on it.

Making changes to the Web site should be a continual process, and the changes should always be exciting both to us and to the readers.

Web analytics is an on-going process. Once the changes are made, start tracking it in the Web logs and evaluate the Web analytics again and again.

And the process goes on and on and on…………….

Got a great idea that could pull in millions of users on Facebook? That neat app that thousands of salesforce.com customers would give their eye teeth for? Need to pull together an app that would get data from Amazon and location information from Google maps? Or an app that gets data from digg and eBay? Need information from RSS feeds and wikis?

One technology that is showing promise to get all of this done is that of “mashups”. A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API. Many people are experimenting with mashups using Microsoft, Google, eBay, Yahoo, Flickr and facebook APIs. [Source: Wikipedia].  Most mashups do more than just integrate services and content; in general, they benefit users in a way that’s better and different than the individual services that they use.

Combining data and code from third-party sources has enabled mashups that add creativity and functionality to web applications. However, browsers are poorly designed to pass data between domains, forcing developers to abandon security for functionality. In addition, mashups on the browser are usually written in Javascript, which could lead to the possibility of malicious code getting executed on your desktop. One way to get around this is to use what are known as server side mashups. We call them Smashups.

Essentially, there are two primary mashup styles – server side mashups (Smashups) and client side mashups. Smashups integrate content and data on the server, while a client side mashup integrates content and data on the client. In a smashup, the server acts as a proxy between the web application on the client and the other web site(s) that takes part in the mashup. Client side mashups mostly use Javascript within a browser and are meant primarily for an interactive user experience. In a Smashup, the client side mashup logic is moved to the server.

Smashup Advantages.

One of the biggest challenges of building a mashup is contending with the basic security protection provided by the browser security sandbox. To protect against malicious attacks, most browsers allow XMLHttpRequest (the basic Ajax Javascript object) to communicate only with the site domain. If the mashup requires a service that is not the server of origin, there’s no way to access it.  In a smashup, the server and not the Javascript code in the browser accesses the service on the other website. Therefore, the smashup is not subject to the browser security sandbox and can access the other site.
There are some other inherent advantages to using a smashup:

• The proxy used in a smashup can act as a buffer between the client and the other website; protecting the client from problems on the other site.
• In cases, where the other site sends back a large amount of data, the server can break up the data into more manageable chunks and send it to the client.
• The data returned from the other site can be cached on the server. Subsequent requests from the client can then be served up from the server reducing unnecessary requests to the other server and increasing the speed of delivery to the client.
• Data returned from the other site may need to be transformed into a different format. The server can transform the data into a format such as JSON, making it easier for the browser to handle the data.
• Security requirements can be handled much more easily server to server using secure protocols. The server could make concurrent and synchronous calls to many data sources at the same time. Most browsers limit the number of concurrent XMLHttpRequests to a small number.
• On the server-side, the smashup can massage the data to be cross-browser compliant 

Building Smashups quickly and easily. 

Regardless of whether you are considering client side mashups or smashups, the basic problem is that creating a mashup is not easy without being an expert programmer. Smashups have advantages in execution, but they are not easy to set up. You still need to be able to code in PHP, ASP.NET, Java or some programming language. You need to understand and be comfortable with Javascripting and understand Web Services.
 

Introducing zeroCode. Here’s your easy, quick way to build server side mashups. The biggest advantage you have is that you can build smashups with absolutely no coding skills. No looking at green screens or futzing around with command lines. A simple point and click environment enables you to build even complex smashups, truly zero coding. Add to that the fact that zeroCode is a completely on-demand environment (www.zerocode.com). That means you have nothing to download and nothing to install. You build on the web and you deploy on the web.

Try it out and see how easily you can build a smashup with zeroCode.

Thanks for the feedback on zeroCode. “Great platform, but your UI sucks….” We hear you. We think zeroCode is a great platform for creating web apps and we are very proud of it. But we are also aware that it’s not the greatest user interface. I know, I know – How can we say zeroCode is meant for non-programmers and then use really techy jargon?

Well, we are in the process of a big facelift for the zeroCode UI. We are changing the terminology within the Design Environment to make it a lot more user-friendly and a lot less techy. We are building lots more tutorials, docs and context-sensitive help. Our UI team is in the process of creating a much more simplified navigation paradigm.

We’ll be rolling all this out soon. So watch out for the new and updated UI for zeroCode and keep that feedback coming in.