Posted by Amy Dugdale on Thu, Aug 27, 2009 @ 11:11 AM
When I finished undergrad, my first job was doing investor relations for pre-IPO dot coms during the late 90s Internet boom. I'm not going to try and be casual about it - undeniably, it was cool. The concept of online search and e-commerce were brand new and SaaS was on the distant horizon. Back then, I had no idea that the day would come when I would count on the Internet for nearly all of my software applications. But that day is definitely here.
Mary Weier recently
blogged about the fact that SaaS companies should "dog food" SaaS and we couldn't agree more. We are eating the SaaS dog food and it tastes pretty good - plus it keeps our internal systems lean. Naturally, we use our own
Hosted Exchange 2007 as well as
Personal Archive and
Discovery Archive. We also use:
•
Zuora for billing
•
Salesforce for CRM
•
Vanguard Vista &
Survey Monkey for surveys
In marketing, we use SaaS applications to help us with our public relations efforts as well as lead generation and nurture marketing. Our HR department also relies on SaaS for benefits administration and other tasks - and we've also got a SaaS-powered knowledgebase.
So, overall - we are finding that the SaaS life is indeed the good life. Now, if only I'd been able to get in on the friends & family buy for the
Amazon.com IPO ;-)