Buying cloud technologies? Asking the wrong question?

POSTED BY CLARK HAUSMANN, ASTADIA, INC. ON FEBRUARY 8, 2010

I was at a client meeting recently.  They were taking a look at their investments in technology and trying to figure out how to get more out of those technologies.  Hey, we’re paying all this money, so what else can it do for me? 

When it’s a license deal, it’s a one time on premise sale.  The money’s gone.  And I find that people aren’t asking these questions of their on premise tools. 

When was the last time you thought to yourself, “How can I get more out of my Microsoft Excel? I’m going to put a whole bunch of resources and time figuring out how I can get more out of Excel for my business.”  You don’t.  It’s one of the best business apps out there, but you don’t think that way about it. 

People do ask those questions about Cloud based applications.  For example, we replace a lot of home grown CRM systems.   When the company developed those systems, did they think, “Well, we’ve spent $2M developing this system, how do we get more out of it?”  They don’t.  They’re asking, “How can I add X and Y pieces of functionality to it? Someone’s screaming for these capabilities, how do we take care of that?” 

From a buyer’s perspective, what can you do to get more out of existing systems investments? 

I think you start with the business problem.  What objectives do you have as a company? 

Then think about the different relationships you have with the companies who provide your cloud based technologies.  What functionality do they enable?  

A lot of times the business problems can be solved using the same platforms or vendors you already have. 

What not to ask: “How do I get more value out of the application?”

Sure, you can look at functionality first, but then you’ve got the technology driving your business.  Figure out what you want to accomplish as a business, and get the technology to provide it. 

Say you have a marketing automation system.  And your business problem is that you need more leads.  Or you have too many leads and need to get down to the ones who are real.  Now you can look at your technology tools and see how they can help you solve that. 

There’s so much we can do now with Saas, PaaS.  Especially when you get down to salesforce.com PaaS, force.com, that level of technology platform.  The technology can made to do any number of things quickly and produce a lot of value. 

The biggest challenge clients have is to clearly define what the business needs to accomplish, and make sure they are asking the technology to do what they actually need.