BusinessCloud9 sat down with RightNow Technologies Jason Mittelstaedt recently to get an update on the firm's current perception of the SaaS marketplace – and found him in an upbeat mood.
“We are really excited about what we saw in the last quarter,” says Mittelstaedt. “Any time there's scrutiny in terms of technology spending, SaaS works. Companies are looking at customer retention and cutting costs. If you don't keep the customers, then you don't have a business. If you have problems with customer retention, then you really need to fix them.
“The other thing that's going on now is that people are stepping back and bringing social media into play in order to cater for networking with customers. Taking care of the customers is the number one thing for marketing programmes to do right now. Everyone is trying to figure out how to work with social networking.
“There's kind of a hockey stick effect that started about 24 months ago. Facebook wasn't even part of the conversation two years ago. Will Facebook be here in two years? One of the things about the current situation is the pace of change. Technology is just an enabler and social networking technologies are the same. A lot of marketing people are having big conversations about this. You know, YouTube is the number two search site in the world. People feel that they need to be involved in social media but they're not necessarily sure what they need to do.
“There are some fundamentals that you need to address. You do need to participate. Michael Dell put it well when he said that if people are going to say bad things about him, he'd rather that they did it in his living room, not in the neighbour's living room. Marketing people have been able to control the message up until now, but now it's all about collaboration.
“What we're talking about now is community dynamics. The community idea itself is inherently powerful. You always have people in the community who are passionate. Wikipedia is a good example. Now, I was sceptical about Wikipedia five years ago but look at what happened there. You take that same principle behind Wikipedia to forums and communities and discussions. Yes there's a danger that you can have people who will poison things, but the people in a community who do try to poison it will get isolated.
“For CIOs, SaaS as a big picture passed a tipping point into acceptance about six months ago. CIOs have gone from resistance to acceptance. They want to participate. They know that the business will leverage SaaS and they want to be relevant. They want to be part of the conversation. CIOs are taking part. “
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