For SaaS to work, it had to be able to deliver results that could meet Williams' business and IT SLAs (service level agreements) in governance, security, performance, application development and deployment, and responsiveness. This was a tough bill to fill, but then Haltiner and his team found out about Oildex. "Oildex was a SaaS company providing ePayables services to the oil and gas industry, and they were running and developing for the accounting software platform that we wanted to use," says Haltiner. "We had many reservations when we considered outsourcing a system like this, but it didn't take long for us to discover that Transzap understood our business. They were able to integrate their SaaS services with our systems and operations, and, most importantly, were able to get us to a point where we are no longer late issuing invoices to our supplier base."
"What it ultimately comes down to is trust," says Peter Flanagan, Transzap's president. "To gain that trust, you must consistently perform to demanding SLAs, and you need detailed knowledge of the industry your customers are in."
SaaS vendors, if they want to be ahead of the curve where more corporate CEOs will be demanding ROI results from their CIOs on cloud services utilization, also need to consider providing fully utilized applications and resources; on-site application development, deployment and maintenance services by a staff with intimate knowledge of the industry sector they are serving; an almost intuitive knowledge of the most pressing concerns of the industry sectors they serve; and governance and security in the form of IT and SAS70 audits for their own data centers (in contrast to handing customers reports from other third party data centers that they simply lease).
This is a tall order for SaaS providers and also for the IT and end business decision makers who will be expected to make more informed decisions on cloud-based resources that produce measurable paybacks as the technology moves forward--but the stakes are worth it. "Since we made the move, we are paying our bills on time, and we save the company an estimated $1.7 million a year in early payment discounts,"says Haltiner. "Our supplier relationships have also improved."
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