Recommending or reselling CRM, Hosted Exchange and more?
SaaS, software as a service, is all the rage these days especially now that Microsoft is in the mix. Microsoft entering the space reconfirms that cloud services, which have already been offered by other providers for years, are here to stay.
Our peers locally, in Portland, and nationwide have been inquiring whether these services are going to steal sales away from the bread and butter product SBS 2003/2008 or worse yet steal business away from them all together. My answer is yes you will find that SaaS services work for some clients where you may have normally recommended SBS and yes you may lose clients all together if the client is price sensitive only seeking the cheapest hosted solutions.
Does that mean the role of trusted IT advisor is going away? No, it just means that you need to modify your porfolio of products and have a good understanding of when to recommend SaaS, or SBS or some other solution.
A word of caution with SaaS, specifically with business critical functions such as CRM and Exchange. If you’re client decides to migrate from their current SaaS provider the migration process may be very messy, if at all possible, let’s break it down.
A ten user environment gets the advice from another solution provider, or kid, that a simple Microsoft Home Server with Hosted Exchange services is the perfect solution for their office. So the solution is implemented and for the first 3 months everything is working great; file sharing, automated backup, shadow copy, remote access, mobile sync…you know all the stuff that makes a business tick. Then out of the blue, the Hosted Exchange provider has an outage, the outage lasts a day and a half. OK, no problem just happend once, then a week later another outage, now the client is not happy we need to find another provider. We now get the call and are asked to step in as their new trusted advisor, I now have to give them the bad news.
- All those shared calendars you have established, those are going to break.
- All those public folders you setup, those will need to be re-established along with permissions. We’ll need to export those public folders to .PST and re-import.
- You use the auto-complete function in Outlook as your address book/contact list…that’s fricken fantastic, will need to migrated those .nk2 files but anything with bsmith.local or server.bsmith we’ll have to manually remove all those references from each .nk2 file.
- We’ll need to export all the Outlook profiles to .PST then re-import under the new provider.
- We’ll need to resetup Mobile phone sync, best to wipe the phone and start clean.
As you can see while SaaS has some great benefits it can quickly turn ugly. The above example was just Hosted Exchange I can’t even imagine the CRM migration process.
So if you begin offering SaaS you better inform your client of the migration or exit strategy if they decide later they don’t like the solution or decide to move to an in-house solution.
Filed under: Business Focus, Hosted CRM, Hosted Exchange, SaaS
Hi Brian.
This is an interesting post, clearly you’re someone who’s picked up the pieces more than once!
Is this issue becoming more common in the US with online services and the lower-cost competitive market?
The real cause of this issue is not the incorrect choice of solution for a critical function, but the quality of the solution you choose. of course, you can move to a disasterously unreliable in-house solution too! The entry of new, small, poorly financed and /or inexperienced service providers into the hosting market is becoming an issue and may be starting to damage the name of the industry too.
How do you chose a provider that doesn’t have multiple 1-day+ outages? Look for experience & track record, scalability and reslience, accreditations and partnerships, inspect the hardware and storage vendors they use, look their company history and finances. It’s also worth bearing in mind that a service provider who’s core business is hosting will be more committed to service delivery that one who’s core business lies else where.
Of the problems you list, I believe these can be similar or worse with an in-house solution further down the line. The “bad news” you give the client is actually just time and money to them – they are paying the IT consultant to fix the issue, they aren’t actually importing their public folders or sync’ing the address book themselves!
Here the client is just spending $$$ on the migration away from a hosted solution – consider the TCO of in-house solution… will they spend this much again every few months/years applying Service Packs, upgrading to Exchange 12, upgrading storage or performance, or installing an archive solution. A bit of pain migrating in/out between service providers isn’t that bad really, it’s not like you’re doing this every 6 months.
With Exchange and CRM – the solution isn’t to have an easy in/easy-out process, it’s to find a reliable, robust and resilient solution which balances the total costs and provides the right level of service for your business. Find this, either in-house, from a service provider, or from Microsoft Online, and you’ve got a trusted solution for life!
thanks, Dan.
Hi Dan,
Good points.
The outage was just one example. Here’s another reason a client may want to switch. Initially a client signs up for service then a year later hundreds of other vendors are offering the same service with larger mailboxes at half the cost.
We have one client in this situation, they chose a local ISP vendor, who’s very well known in the local Portland market, to provide their hosted exchange. It turns out during their many outages that the ISP is just reselling services which was a big surprise to the client. They’re paying $12.95 plus $2.50 for anti-spam for 200 megabyte mailboxes and no archiving solution is available, so you can imagine the client’s dilemna.
The vendors price to move up to just a 500 megabyte mailbox is $29.95 and to a gigabyte $49.95 way out of proportion to what’s available from hundreds of other vendors.
The migration cost for the client of 60 users would be very significant and a lot of headache.
It’s hard enough to get references from local vendors, let alone a vendor on the other side of the country. Yes, you can get some names and numbers but how do you truly validate that you’re talking to a client?
Now, with Microsoft in the picture does that truly make them trusted just because they’re Microsoft. That may just make them inflexible and unwilling to adjust to market conditions and client needs.
To the positive side of SaaS, if you’re offering or re-selling these hosted solutions you have a great hook for clients to not leave, due to the headache of switching. All the more reason to get into offering these services.
Thanks again Dan.
Brian