The Widen Appliance continues to evolve as the hybrid between installed and hosted software platforms in the digital asset management market.  There still remains an uncertainty in the marketplace about how to categorize such a hybrid device, so we explained the following points about the Widen Appliance to third party experts, such as Mukul Krishna, global manager of digital media practice for the research firm Frost & Sullivan.

• Owned, operated, and maintained by Widen Enterprises, Inc.
• Resides within the customer infrastructure
• Internal users interact at network speeds
• Integration with Widen data center

The consensus is that the definition of software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the most appropriate categorization because the device is owned, operated, and maintained by Widen.  Even though the Appliance exists within the customer infrastructure, it is still managed by the service provider and therefore, most appropriately defined as part of the SaaS model.
 
As a SaaS provider, we targeted two objectives for the initial release:

It’s nice to attend a conference where you don’t have to explain what SaaS means or go into your pitch about the benefits of a SaaS model.  I am at the SaaS Summit in San Francisco coordinated by OpSource (www.opsource.net) which appears to be the largest gathering of SaaS providers to date.   A well organized event with representation from organizations including Salesforce.com, Omniture, Microsoft, Clickability, Vtrenz, MySQL, Oracle, and many more.

In a keynote address by Greg Urquhart, GM at Microsoft, he explained a term that Microsoft uses, S+S.  Not SaaS, ASP, Managed Service, On-Demand, or Hosted, but S+S, which means “software plus services.”  Greg explained the reasoning for the term; SaaS is the delivery aspect of a larger value.  Greg’s delivery was a good overview of how Microsoft is positioned to embrace SaaS.

Omniture’s CEO Josh James followed with the success story of his web analytics company.  Josh walked through some financials and sales/marketing approaches that Omniture used to establish market dominance.  One of which is QBSR’s – quarterly bearing sales representatives – with a high-powered service team in place to meet the customer demand after the sale.

The forecasts, research, trends, case studies, and success stories all point to a significant rise in SaaS popularity.  Speakers cited IDC data forecasting a 32% CAGR over the next 5 years, which amounts to the SaaS market growing by $11.2 billion.  William McNee with Saugatuck Research contributed statistics by communicating that 70% of business will have deployed at least 1 SaaS application by 2012. 

William also talked about customer satisfaction with SaaS providers is greater than that of installed software citing 84% of customers who deployed a SaaS application are satisfied.  In my opinion, the reason for this is because SaaS providers do not go away after the initial sale – which is when all the heavy lifting starts – implementation, training, and service & support.   Customers need to have a hand-holding experience. 

As the sole representative of the digital asset management industry, I was on an education mission.  It was clear that not everyone in this audience knew the term but everyone, as usual, liked saying the acronym over and over again (at least I could leave out the SaaS pitch).  In most of these cases, DAM fits as a component within these larger offerings acting as an enabler to other applications.

I wanted to talk about the paradigm shift from finding and deploying marketing solutions that claim to be the “jack of all trades” to working with specialized software as a service providers who develop systems that best meet the individual requirements of each function.  SaaS-based architectures allow companies to tie their systems together with web services and still take advantage of the specialized service, ongoing upgrades and support from the individual providers. 
 
In this video blog, I mention our own use of our digital asset management system, the Salesforce.com CRM, ExactTarget Email Marketing, and Compendium Blogware.  
 

Ever hear a software provider say they had the most “scalable, feature-rich application for the enterprise with global integration using web services through a robust, web-enabled platform while adhering to best-in-class workflow technology.”

What the hell is that?

It is meaningless; overused and way too broad for anyone to truly understand.  I have never met someone in the software or software-as-a-service business that doesn’t use these words; even yours truly is guilty of such vocabulary abuse in the digital asset management market.

Do software providers really think people understand these words or do they just use them to sound smart?  If the providers think they sound smart, an honest self-evaluation would reveal a glaring ignorance cleverly hidden behind a smoke screen of fancy vocabulary.  If providers don’t correlate these words with the customer situation they are not helping matters, they are wasting time.

So if someone wants to waste your time with a software presentation using meaningless and overused words, then at least you can have fun with it.  Using the classic game of Connect 4, use the chart below in a software presentation.  Whenever the provider uses one of these words without proper explanation of what it means and how it can help you, color in the square.  When you get four squares vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, you have officially wasted your time with that provider.

If you are in a committee buying situation, mix up the words for each attendee and bring it to the meeting.  First one with four squares in a row is the first one to realize they are wasting their time…congrats.

I recently recorded a video to introduce many of the topics appearing in one of our whitepapers:

"Realizing the value proposition of hosted DAM solutions — A case study" authored by Mukul Krishna, Global Manager of Digital Media Practice at Frost & Sullivan.

View the video: Digital Asset Management Software as a Service 

The video is broken out in the following segments:

• Projected growth patterns of the DAM vendor landscape
• Blurring the lines with Software as a Service
• Increasing productivity
• Relieving I.T.
• Widen's Value Proposition
• Interpreting the "unarticulated demand"
• The Widen Appliance

The author of the whitepaper, Mukul Krishna, is widely recognized as an expert and thought leader in the Digital Media industry with his primary expertise being in the Digital Asset Management, Video Server, Streaming and Encoding markets.

Download the complete article / white paper from the Journal of DAM

The whitepaper appeared in the Journal of Digital Asset Management (2007) and uncovers the buzz about hosted digital asset management, the DAM SaaS Vendor landscape, a Widen profile and case study featuring one of our more notable clients – Reebok.

Have you ever been to the magical place where your technology projects are the top priority? 

If you have NEVER used a software-as-a-service provider, you have been trained to say something like, “my I.T. department does everything possible to make sure marketing projects are #1.  If I need something now, they tell me I can have it within the year then actually deliver it in three years.  You don’t get any higher prioritization than that so take your magical place and shove it!”

I have met some marketers that like to use their internal I.T. departments because they need excuses for why things don’t get done; an I.T. scapegoat, what a great way to avoid accountability.  When it comes to review time, they just say, “I handed off the project to I.T. but they are swamped, should see something next year sometime.”

If this is you, the software-as-a-service model will just not work.   Your sense of practicality is skewed because you think that you can get more done by relying on installed software and your I.T. teams versus software-as-a-service providers.  No need to read any further, you’ll be looking for a job soon anyway.

Software-as-a-service providers allow marketers to expand reach, build equity, and grow profitability without having to worry about all the nuances related to installing and maintaining software within your infrastructure.  The I.T. teams don’t like you anyway, so get over it and start taking control of your projects.  Be a champion for the marketing cause, not someone that makes excuses for why your stuff doesn’t get done.

Let’s take one of the industries that Widen participates in as an example: digital asset management.  This software technology allows marketing and creative professionals to centralize, manage, and distribute branded materials such as video, images, and other digital media. 

What reason would you have for purchasing software and running it internally? 

One reason is that you may need digital media available at local area network speeds for internal marketing and creative users so the “through the internet thing” just won’t work.

To further define, software-as-a-service doesn’t mean all digital media is hosted and the only access point is through the internet.  Software-as-a-service architectures mean you don’t worry about the software and hardware implementation, setup, configuration, integration, and maintenance – that is why you selected Widen (in this example).  Your digital media will be made available at local speeds using the Widen Appliance (www.widen.com/appliance) with integration all the way to the desktop. 

You know man’s best friend to be a dog, now you know I.T.’s best friend to be the Widen Appliance.  It keeps marketing and creative out of their hair and it addresses something they don’t want to deal with – large, complicated, cross-platform material.  Words that make most I.T. people nervous: managing terabytes, Macintosh.

Using the Widen Appliance in conjunction with hosted software-as-a-service for digital asset management throws a wrench into the ongoing debate of hosted versus installed.  You can have the best of both worlds and not worry about getting into a drunken fist fight with your I.T. counterpart at the Holiday party.

More pros for software-as-a-service architectures as the ramblings continue...

Matthew

I'm Matthew Gonnering. In a 10-minute conversation that is supposed to be 2-minutes, you will clearly see I am a rambling marketer. The madness comes from my passion for marketing and why global domination is actually a reasonable goal with the right resources.

I have a fancy executive title for visionary purposes but getting in the marketing trenches is where I revolutionize change.

My goal is to help marketing teams create sustainable change within their departments leveraging internal champions to influence stakeholders and take all the credit.

Caution before reading this stuff: my highly competitive spirit may offend the avoiders and compromisers.