• May 24, 2018
  • Prashant Shetty
  • 0

SAAS Customers Engage Experts

Cloud SaaS applications are in a state of constant change. By nature, cloud applications are architected to deliver best-in-class and industry leading practices along with technology innovations in a rapid incremental fashion. In this Forbes article, Chuck Hollis, SVP, Cloud Infrastructure at Oracle says that “Cloud is the Perpetual Upgrade”. It’s like your smartphone in home Wifi network – when you wake up after a good night’s sleep, your apps would’ve got upgraded with awesome new features or bug fixes. In addition to SaaS vendors making application changes, customer’s businesses face strong headwinds in the VUCA world (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity). One of my previous blogs delved into how SaaS customers are dealing with these external factors.

Even though internal IT operations and end users are trained on the Cloud application at the time of implementation, they are usually not equipped to run the Cloud Application on their own. Over time, the dynamic nature of the underlying application or the changing business priorities & requirements need them to lean on experts to manage their impacted changes in the Cloud application.

With the above background, am sharing SOAIS’ experience of the top three reasons why SaaS customers reached out to SOAIS and what were the initial pain points SOAIS addressed:

1- Fast track Implementations:

During the purchase cycle of Cloud SaaS software, business teams end up with the impression that Cloud implementation process is “way quicker” than the old fashioned on-premise days. While this is true, reality sinks when the actual implementation get scheduled – often inputs needed from business teams or decisions to re-engineer internal processes remain open. Managing expectations from all stakeholders is key for the implementation partner and often “low priority” items get parked. After the go-live, there will be a laundry list of items that becomes nobody’s baby after the implementation partner is done.

2- Ops/Admin teams not fully skilled:

The class room training sessions or user guides from the implementation project are rarely good enough for the Operations / Admin team members to do application changes like changing configurations or updating reports or regression testing the application at the time of upgrades

3- Business process or regulatory changes:

Businesses in the competitive world continuously innovate and need their back-end systems to support their changing business processes. At times, regulatory changes will need corresponding changes in application configurations or new reporting requirements. In-house customer teams are rarely equipped to deal with these by themselves.

Reacting to the above changes which arise from time to time and in different parts of the application means the customer needs access to a variety of skills on a short-term basis. And that’s the strong proposition, SOAIS has chosen to address with its “Shared Services Pool”, a budget friendly, customer-focussed, process driven delivery team. Contact us to know more.

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