The SaaS landscape has continued to grow despite the current economic hardships. In fact, the recession has helped many Cloud vendors establish a foothold with SMEs, thanks to their subscription-based business models that provide an affordable alternative to the upfront costs of traditional on-premise software. One such firm is Workbooks. Jon Wilcox met up with CEO John Cheney to hear about the company's bold ambitions.
Workbooks has launched its first two products, built upon the company’s proprietary WorkbooksONE platform, which aims to deliver what it calls a high-level integrated system specifically for SMEs. Workbooks CRM focuses on the sales and marketing side of a business, and Workbooks Business adds further functionality, including the ability to create invoices, raise purchase orders, and bridge back- and front-end business processes. A third application, scheduled to launch later in 2009, will offer accounting functionality to the suite.
The firm has been co-founded by John Cheney, a SaaS veteran for the past decade through his time with BlackSpider Technologies and Surf Control and someone with personal experience of the frustrations of traditional IT systems. “I couldn't hire lots of dedicated IT staff to run and maintain the systems I needed. The real challenge was that we had two different systems, and in a lot of cases, a lot of the same data in both,” he recalls. “The emphasis for Workbooks is to drive top-line growth and improving productivity of an SME.
“If you think about what I would describe as the ‘prospect-to-cash’ process (going from the identification of new prospects, taking them through the marketing and sales processes, and ultimately turning them into a customer), we didn’t have one joined up business system that did that for us, unlike the enterprise space. If you are a billion dollar company, you can afford to implement SAP... But if you’re a SME, then they’re far too expensive.”
Being delivered as a SaaS offering has meant Workbooks has been able to develop its productivity suite at what it feels is a more affordable price for SMEs. “What we’re doing at Workbooks are two things,” explains Cheney. “We’re firstly delivering an integrated suite of applications to the SME sector. Secondly, we’re doing that through the SaaS delivery model, which is a much more cost-effective way for SMEs to buy that IT, because they don’t have the overheads of dedicated servers, IT systems, and people. We can manage that all for them, and deliver them an integrated platform.”
Bold Ambitions
The SaaS space is developing its own heavyweights to rival traditional on-premise vendors, but that hasn’t limited Workbook's competitive ambitions. “We’re more likely to be running up against SalesForce.com on the CRM side of things, and then clearer Sage on the more traditional accounting applications,” reckons Cheney. “But I think Netsuite is the most obvious direct competitor to us, although their visibility in the UK is fairly low in comparison.We see ourselves as much richer in the front-office customer service application, though to be fair to Netsuite, I think they’ve been fairly successful as a business.”
Cheney claims the biggest difference between his product and Netsuite is Workbooks’ user interface and 'Rich Application' experience, which gives customers a “much more of a PC experience than a flat web browser experience.” This, he says, is getting a lot of attention from early customers. “We’re already in the process of signing our first customers,| he says. “Before launch, we were working with our beta customers and we’ll have the first few of those signed up for the service. That level of traction with our beta clients has been great, and as we start coming to market, I’d expect that traction to continue.”
Developing a strong user experience and setting high goals is one thing, but the two major issues for today’s SaaS providers are security and reliability of their respective services. Pointing out that Netsuite’s data centres are based in the geologically volatile state of California (“I’d prefer my data to be somewhere closer to home in two difference data centres!"), the Workbooks CEO says that their own data centres are based in the UK and no more than nine miles apart. “We’re the only SaaS provider, I think globally, that delivers this kind of application from two separate data centres simultaneously,” claims Cheney. “We’ve got two different data centres running the same infrastructure, which are highly available. You can be connected to one or either at the same time.
“Architecturally speaking, we’re more robust than our competitors, and we’re also going through the process of certifying the business against ISO 27001 – an information security standard. That’s a benchmark where we’re externally audited to ensure we have the right security framework in our business to protect both customers and our own data.”
