Note the following points to make enterprise applications successful into SaaS

Recently, there is a problem that has plagued us, that is software company's transition from a traditional business model to SaaS, what should be noted during the transition, and what solutions are more representative. for those software companies that are considering the transition, there are several factors in the transition period business in each department should be considered carefully. For those kinds of doubts, although not one answer, play a number of departments of the actual combat experience and basic ideas, it is worth our good look.

Sales Department

Sales people accept a pre-sales delegate, Therefore, establishing a commission system based on annuity will never motivate your sales team to sell your software products in a subscription-based billing mode. So you will need to review the sales compensation model for your company.

This is not just a question of compensation: you can technically use a permanent license and a SaaS subscription model. However, you need to study how to compensate the difference between the subscribers ' sales and the original income.

In most cases, at the grassroots level, even the front-line management, compensation should be given according to the number of bookings. This means that a layout-neutral plan can solve all the problems. However, senior sales management can compensate for revenue, which means they will try to steer the SaaS transaction, especially those that have been at the end of the quarter with a switch to license sales. In addition, you also need to take into account your indirect channels, they also like to obtain profits through direct license resale.

Finally, if you set up a subscription billing period for your subscribers (for example, 12-36 months), you will need to review the next time you rebuild your SaaS to ensure that your sales team has the right incentives to maintain customer relationships. Remember, finding new customers is more difficult than maintaining a good relationship with existing customers.

Marketing Department

In the past, as companies were internally deployed, software companies were competing for features and functionality, as well as for the underlying architecture. In SaaS delivery mode, the underlying architecture is not the most important for customers because they no longer really touch the infrastructure.

The customer does not care about the Web server running your software, whether it is distributed through Java EE or. NET technology, or what database server you use to store the data. However, your customers will definitely care about the features and features of your products and whether they are easy to use (i.e. whether the Service software application you provide will satisfy them).

New benefits of the SaaS model include service level agreements (SLAs), overall reliability, protection of your data, and security for a variety of certifications.

The benefits are endless, but the other thing I want to emphasize is the customer market service in key regions: how you respond to your customers. In SaaS mode, the cost of conversion still exists, but its barriers have not been so expensive, after all, capital investment has been removed.

Finance Department

The sales business model that is determined by quarterly revenue from the sales of permanent software licensing and maintenance costs is no longer in demand. With the development of a monthly subscription service, the financial system at the back end of the software company will need to change. You will need new standards to track your application (that is, the number of times each user logged on to the enterprise per month).

Do you send service bills to all active and inactive users? Do you account for a registered user? Do you have users or user data? Are you charging based on the services your users enjoy? These are the important questions you need to answer in the process of transitioning to the SaaS model. When you answer these questions, you should begin to realize that the monthly revenue recognition for your business is more optimistic.

Investors will prefer and reward the behavior of generating income flows. However, this is by no means a simple transition. There are other areas that you need to take full account of: you need to consider your financial model. If your application or service does not satisfy your customers, they will leave.

Billing/Invoicing is also very important. Have you ever sent an invoice to your customer for a permanent license and then sent them a maintenance fee the following year? You will be required to send a monthly invoice document to your subscribers if you have already started to send a monthly bill to you to collect the related fees on a regular basis each month. Unless you are an ISV (independent software developer) implementing billing software, we recommend finding the right financial partner, rather than trying to build your own billing engine. Your customer may be extremely complex and how you send your bills or invoice documents will depend on your business model, application, usage model, and your customers.

Operations Department

In the past, your customers, software companies, or integrators were required to vote on applications and infrastructure issues together. What's more, it is up to the customer or integrator to decide. Software companies are usually ranked second or third. The complexity of traditional software deployment operations depends on how your customers implement your software.

In SaaS mode, your software runs in the cloud. Whether it is hosted by a third party or deployed internally, operational support will shift away from your customers completely. How you respond to queries and issues requires clearly defined processes and procedures, especially if you want to support 24x365 reliability.

In conclusion, I suggest that all software companies should not try to find a way to transform their business, but instead seek out experts (such as a professional service team) to help them transition.

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