Selling a SaaS Appliance

Socialtext is hiring sales people right now. As I conduct the interviews, I’m impressed by smart and highly skilled candidates that have dropped by our headquarters in Palo Alto.

In each conversation, one question inevitably comes up: “It was my understanding that Socialtext is a SaaS company, but you guys deploy on an appliance. Isn’t that a little weird?”

The truth is, our customers love our managed appliance, and it’s actually quite in line with our SaaS business model. The appliance brings customers the best of both worlds. It provides them with a system that is easy to set up and implement with nearly zero management. At the same time, the data is secure, onsite and adheres to the company’s internal data requirements.

Although Socialtext has strict requirements around our data center that runs our hosted service, for some companies, the complex requirements of their industry might require them to run our software on site, and we’re happy to provide that option.

The conversation typically goes like this:

Customer – I can put it in behind my firewall, control when updates are installed and not have to worry about learning languages or procuring a bunch of hardware?’
Me – Yep
Customer – And it’s secure?
Me – Yep
Customer – How many heads do I have to allocate to manage it?
Me – About 15 – 30 minutes a month to make the calls for the updates.
Customer – And it hooks into LDAP & SharePoint?
Me – Sure does.
Customer – Where do I sign?

Of course, it isn’t always quite that easy, but I’m confident the Socialtext Managed Appliance gives us a great competitive advantage.

And we see it as an asset in the wide array of industries that purchase our enterprise social software. Financial services firms love it because it aligns with their compliance requirements. Healthcare organizations jump all over it because all the data is stored on site. Media companies get it because it is simple to deploy and easy to access by all employees. Even the US Federal Government uses it because it exceeds their security requirements. Most importantly, all of our customers choose Socialtext because our social applications are flexible to the way their business works. The appliance makes this easier.

Is the idea of an on-premise, SaaS solution weird? Not at all. Google, Barracuda and many others have been doing it for years. Is it unique to Socialtext for social software? Most definitely.

By the way, if you know any good candidates, send them my way.

SaaS, Socialtext Appliance

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