A Stroll Down Memory Lane for Software-as-a-Service

Refreshing to see a DAM Vendor CEO Blogging 🙂

by Matthew Gonnering CEO Widen

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) demand continues to rise thanks to the pairing of great technology providers and decision makers trusting in the SaaS model to help solve their business challenges. We speak with prospective customers every minute of the day and the shift in demand over the last 3 years has been enlightening. Isolating the request for proposals (RFP) alone can give you insight into how buyers have changed.

Three years ago we had RFP’s for digital asset management (DAM) because the organizations had challenges managing their collections of digital media (and still do today, just an exponentially greater volume of digital media). But only a fraction of these DAM RFP’s (appropriate use of acronyms but the irony of the DAM RFP is oh so great) were requesting how they could better manage their images, audio, and video files because the rest of it was specifying hardware and other I.T. requirements. As a SaaS provider, it was a simple copy and paste of the words, “Not Applicable, Software-as-a-Service Provider.”

So the SaaS providers would rarely get invited any further in the process, but on occasion would be taken to the final decision to stand against the installed software provider just so the organization could compare apples and oranges. If you could hear what was being said in the decision room, it might have sounded something like this (with heavy sarcasm for fun):

“We have entertained two different methods of deploying our digital asset management technology. One method is purchasing software from a digital asset management provider and then using all our available I.T. resources to acquire the necessary hardware that we will never upgrade.

A few other highlights if we go with the installed DAM software option:

Continues @http://blog.widen.com/blog/widen-enterprises/0/0/a-stroll-down-memory-lane-for-software-as-a-service