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05.04.09 Ending Traditional Software Maintenance Fees For CRM  By Jim Berkowitz Here are several excerpts for an article about Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's call for "the end" of traditional software maintenance fees. A key takeaway here is that when comparing the cost of on-premise CRM to on-demand CRM services, annual fees charged by on-premise vendors for maintenance and support must be considered. In an internal e-mail to his management team Tuesday, Benioff described a conversation he had with an Oracle Siebel CRM (customer relationship management) user at a recent event. "This customer currently uses Siebel software to run her call center. She pays more than $15 million a year for the privilege of having to implement the updates that Siebel sends her," he wrote in the e-mail, which was seen by IDG News Service. "That does not include backup. Or disaster recovery. And of course, it does not guarantee that she will be using the latest technology. The maintenance agreement only assures her that her outdated software will continue to work." The unnamed Siebel customer, Benioff said, "is paying tolls on a road to nowhere." Salesforce.com's on-demand CRM model can provide that customer and others "much more for a fraction of what they currently pay in maintenance," Benioff added. While at heart, Benioff's remarks aren't radically different from Salesforce.com's long-time marketing mantra, "the end of software," the e-mail comes at a time when enterprises around the world are looking to pare back wherever possible on IT spending, with reducing maintenance costs a top priority…
Meanwhile, rival vendor Oracle and its customers are currently in the throes of end-of-fiscal year contract renewals. And SAP, which announced a richer-featured but more expensive maintenance service last year to outcry from many customers, has been working with user groups on a set of KPIs (key performance indicators) meant to document the new service's value. In his e-mail, Benioff characterized traditional maintenance, paid as a percentage of total license costs, as far inferior to SaaS (software as a service) like Salesforce.com. "Maintenance fees cover updates that are mostly patches and fixes, but they stop far short of the kind of innovation every that enterprise needs to survive," he wrote. "We sell our customers a service and every customer is able to use the latest. Innovations are included. Upgrades are automatic and invisible. … The service gets better, not just less buggy." Benioff's critiques should be taken in the proper context, said Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang. "First of all, Salesforce.com's prices take the cost of customer support into account, he said. Second, while in some cases, SaaS may be cheaper for customers than on-premise software, it may not be in all, according to Wang. "It depends on how much you use it, how many people are using it." SaaS is "really a lifestyle decision" for companies that don't want to deal with the hassle of maintaining infrastructure, he added. "A large part of the so-called investment that traditional on-premise software vendors, such as SAP and Oracle, make in product development does not go toward new products or new functionality," he said. "Rather, it goes into porting and regression testing every product change against myriad combinations of databases, versions, server and desktop OS releases, middleware, and third-party products.," noted Frank Scavo, the Managing Partner of consulting firm Strativa. SaaS vendors can avoid many of these costs because they only need to write to their own platforms, and "therefore, they ought to be able to deliver the same functionality for lower cost," he said. Comments About the Author: Jim Berkowitz is a seasoned executive with more than 30 years of professional services and project management experience related to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Financial Management (Accounting & ERP) software solutions for small, mid-sized and Fortune 500 companies. As a Sales Force Automation and CRM Consultant, Jim has assisted more then 100 companies with the design and implementation of custom CRM solutions. Mr. Berkowitz is the founder and President of CRM Mastery, Inc.; a company dedicated to serving small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) by offering affordable tools and guidance to help them plan for and succeed with their CRM initiatives. |
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