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Ideas, tips and techniques for new generation selling and customer support.
Tag Archives: saas
2010
On-Line Appointment Market Looks to Grow, TimeTrade Gets Set To Grow With It
The on-line appointment scheduling market is beginning to take off, says TimeTrade Systems CEO Ed Mallen in a story recently published in MassHighTech.com.
“The switch will be like banks going to ATMs,” Mallen says. “It’s a very natural play to begin to have consumers be able to make their appointments over the web and be satisfied that when they get there the resource is going to be ready, willing and able.”
TimeTrade, a market maker in on-line appointment scheduling since its founding in 1999, has its sights set on that $5-$8 billion market opportunity, according to Mallen.
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Filed under: appointment scheduling software
Tagged: appointment scheduling software, saas
2009
Information Week: Do SaaS vendors eat their own dog food? (We do.)
In yesterday’s Information Week, Mary Hayes Weier penned The SaaS Industry Should Eat Its Own Dog Food,looking at whether vendors of cloud computing / software as a service practice what they preach. Some do, some don’t. She points out that Salesforce.com, which is doing a good job of kicking the butt of non-SaaS CRM systems, nonetheless uses Oracle for accounts payable.
I think it’s actually a case of the right tool for the job: using the cloud when it’s appropriate. I can’t speak for Salesforce’s thinking, but I know TimeTrade uses a mix. We ourselves use Salesforce for sales and marketing, but our A/P is desktop, as are our productivity tools. Word is still much more productive than Google Docs, and it’ll be a loooooong time before Google’s spreadsheet comes close to Excel. That was true for Excel 2003 and it got a lot truer when Excel 2007 transmogrified into a whole new power tool.
For you speed freaks out there, I want to note that SaaS is getting smarter. A frequently heard swipe at SaaS is that when your app runs in the cloud, you’re governed by the size of your pipe to and from the cloud: every click is a page load. Well, not so much: clever Flash and Ajax methods let more be pre-loaded so it can run fast.
Of course for appointment scheduling, we can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t use the cloud – especially since the more you scale the application, the more you depend on accurate real-time resource availability information. That’s why we’ve been cloud since our founding in 2000 – the same time as Salesforce.com.
2009
The Software-as-a-Service Conversation – and Conversion – is Alive and Going Strong
I participated as a panelist in a Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council event this morning focused on the marketing and sales opportunities and challenges with moving to and supporting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. TimeTrade’s personal appointment scheduler TimeDriver and many of our enterprise solution customers leverage our technology through a SaaS-based model.
The major benefit of SaaS – and something we obviously feel strongly about – is driving better customer service and delivering a great customer experience. We as service providers get to know our customers almost on a first-name basis through offering on-demand solutions and understand real-time how they are using our services/applications. We’re able to leverage our customers’ great ideas and feedback quickly to enable new capabilities that helps them improve their business. If something needs to be addressed, we know it right away and can respond. Not possible with licensed or packaged applications.
One of the many companies speaking this morning was Constant Contact – a company who has leveraged SaaS and the customer experience to be the leader in email marketing and online surveys.
On-demand has reshaped how companies, like ours, do business. Marketing has moved from traditional methods such as print advertising to leveraging Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and analysis tools, creating vertically-focused promotions and offering free trials to virally drive adoption. Results are measured real-time rather than quarterly enabling our marketing programs to be much more effective and focused.
Being reported constantly in the news is the trend that the companies who will succeed in this challenging economic environment are those that define themselves by delivering the ultimate in customer service. SaaS certainly is a platform to help drive customer satisfaction and create customer promoters.
Filed under: online scheduling, scheduling software
Tagged: customer experience, customer service, saas
2009
SaaS Success: Bringing enterprise lessons to personal appointments
An article by TimeTrade CEO Ed Mallen appeared today on GigaOm and was cross-posted to Salon.com. We’re only allowed to show you the lead paragraph…
One of the key sales criteria in the enterprise application space — and one of the greatest development challenges — is the ability to scale. At TimeTrade we have met that challenge, creating a successful business selling SaaS-based applications that enable very large organizations and businesses to schedule and manage millions of appointments. …
For the whole story including the six tips, please do visit GigaOm or Salon.
Filed under: online scheduling, scheduling software
Tagged: efficiency, ROI, saas
2009
WebWorkerDaily: 10 Apps You Can’t Do Without, including (of course) scheduling software
I’m loving this post, from Aliza Sherman at WebWorkerDaily today — 10 Apps You Can’t Do Without:
So you’ve been downsized. Or you’ve bailed before being booted because you saw the writing on the wall. Or maybe you skipped the steady paycheck for a go at being a freelancer. Whatever the reason you’re out there on your own now, we’ve compiled a list of apps you’ll need to run your web-working business.
The categories she covers are ALL SaaS, and a lot are Web 2.0, with heavy emphasis on efficiency and collaboration:
Invoice management, time tracking, CRM, RSS readers, email tools, phone (concall and VoiP services), calendars / scheduling, document collaboration, and file storage / backup.
Happily, in the scheduling software category she cites our TimeDriver, which she’s mentioned before.
I’ll be using some of the tools she mentions myself, because although she may write primarily for individuals, the goodies she cites are useful for bigger orgs than that, and for individuals within big orgs. (For instance,TimeDriver is used by people in massive healthcare companies, massive insurance companies, etc. Heck, Microsoft Word is an individual tool too, but it’s used by the thousands.)
I’m especially interested in her post Project Management, Collaboration and How Our Brains Work as we begin porting our web presence to a new platform.
Business takeaway: You don’t have to be solo to value these tools, because you don’t have to be solo to be a Web worker.
(And for anyone who takes appointments, large or small, appointment scheduling software like TimeDriver can save a boatload of time.)
Good post, Aliza. We’re subscribing.
Related content: case study TimeDriver eliminates tedious scheduling time for driven real estate coach (may require free registration)
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: appointment scheduling, collaboration, efficiency, saas, web 2.0
2009
From the IT Examiner: SaaS is poised to expand
In a downturn there is always opportunity.
Enterprises today face enormous pressure to cut IT expenses. That takes the form of layoffs, lower capital expenditures (capex), and fewer strategic application initiatives. Even when an enterprise chooses a solution, time to market can get dragged out. And that hurts, because it delays payback.
But to us at TimeTrade this as an opportunity, because SaaS is a prudent choice for lean times. Aharon Etengoff wrote about it in Tuesday’s IT Examiner, saying 42% growth in SaaS is expected in 2009. He quoted IDC research director Robert Mahowald:
“Revenue from SaaS services will increase in 2009–2010 more than we previously estimated. SaaS thrives in down cycles, and as with the 2000–2001 downturn that gave Salesforce.com its start, the current freeze in IT and related Capex spending will help assure solid growth for most SaaS providers.”
SaaS is known to have two key benefits for enterprise adopters, but at TimeTrade I’ve seen a third. The obvious ones:
- Capex is eliminated, and there’s no longer any question that it consumes less IT resource. This means enterprises who adopt SaaS don’t face the traditional delays required to get capex approved, purchase servers, and schedule the application into their data center’s always-overloaded queue. Instead, SaaS providers provision the solution in their own hosting center. It’s ideal for lean times.
- SaaS provides much faster time-to-benefit because it comes up faster. The application gets in front of the customer quickly, which in turn shortens the horizon to achieve the original objective.
The third, though, is not so widely discussed: those factors mean whole new applications become possible through SaaS, enabling breakthrough revenue opportunities.
Case in point: Web self-service appointment scheduling. TimeTrade was born of the Web (during the dot-bomb downturn) and lives on the Web. The appointment engine that started out serving a one-man diveboat charter can today serve huge photography chains and massive retail businesses.
SaaS scales, and it lets customers tune their investment to the moment, conserving capital. It’s a lean and agile strategy. So I agree with IDC: as uncertain as 2009 may be, SaaS apps are the best bet in town. For good reason.
Ed Mallen is President and CEO of TimeTrade Systems.
Filed under: online scheduling, scheduling software
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