Beyond the buzzword: SaaS and deployment times

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To all of the other dads in the world out there, Happy Father's Day! I enjoyed Sunday with a trip to the children's museum, some touch football with my buddies and fellow dads, tasty BBQ and rocking Guitar Hero on the Wii. And lots of love throughout. I hope your day was as wonderful as mine was.

Back to business, as a leader, I've always been a nut about the importance of on-time delivery. Whether it's releasing a new software version or launching a new website, it's critical to be predictable. So many other people and organizations (internal and external) build around your scheduled date. So slipping creates a snowball effect.

This is why I have always been so fascinated by how long it takes to get on-premise email archiving software deployed. I would find that customers often took several months and in some cases years to get internal archiving projects fully up and running. This was despite all of our significant efforts as vendors to simplify the installation process.

Over time, I realized that client delays in deployment were only partially related to software installation:

• Delays in storage configuration. In many organizations, storage is a separate discipline and sometimes a distinct organization. As I described, the process of choosing, sizing, procuring and provisioning storage is non-trivial. Obviously with a SaaS email archiving solution, the storage is automatically provisioned and scaled behind the scenes.
• Delays in server configuration. Customers typically have a standard server vendor. But they often struggle deciding how many servers they need to handle the archiving load and also maintain reliability. Most on-premise vendors offer excellent sizing guides. But many of these documents are 50-100 pages and still require follow-up consultation with the vendor and/or their partner. In a SaaS deployment, customers don't have to think about sizing or servers - they simply think about the service that they need.
  
• Delays in selecting and scheduling professional services. Nearly every on-premise email archiving vendor recommends or requires professional services for installation and deployment. If you are choosing an on-premise solution, I highly recommend this route as the complexity is significant; you should trust the experts. Some vendors offer services through their own firm. Others also offer services through partners. Customers often need to decide on which partner is the most proficient (or whether to use the vendor directly). Then they need to negotiate on rates and terms. Finally, they have to schedule the consultant(s) to come on-site. Not surprisingly, given how hot email archiving is, getting a consultant on-site can often take 4-6 weeks or more. Clearly with a SaaS email archiving offering, the software is already deployed; all that is required is to personalize it for your needs.
• Delays because you have to get it right the first time. Most significantly, customers know that they have to "get it right the first time" with an on-premise deployment. It takes so long that you absolutely can't go through it again. So customers often spend weeks in committee meetings to make sure everyone buys off on the approach. Anyone that works in an organization of any size knows that universal consensus can take a while. One of the beautiful aspects of SaaS email archiving is that you can get up and running right away and tweak it as you go.

In reality, the "next-next-next" of the Windows installer for the on-premise product is often the smallest part of the deployment time. On-premise vendors can only go so far in terms of addressing this issue.

In contrast, SaaS email archiving solutions are up in running in hours to days, not weeks to months to years. Customers simply configure their email server to domain to forward/journal email to us. We take care of the rest.

I hate delays. :)