Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele on "The Great Cloud Rush of 2009"

Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele (pictured at left) has an interesting article published this week in Information Management, where he discusses the "Great Cloud Rush of 2009." As Information Management says in their teaser for this article, a "seismic shift in business processes and company culture is necessary to successfully offer cloud services."

In the article, Gary talks about the reasons that cloud computing-based solutions (such as Proofpoint's SaaS email security solutions and email archiving product) have become so popular of late.

Gary argues that, in order to capitalize on the demand for such solutions, vendors of traditional "on-premises" software and appliance products will have to fundamentally change the way they develop, sell and support their products. There's some great advice in this article for vendors looking to move to SaaS as well as customers who are considering adopting SaaS solutions. Here's an excerpt:

"In the rush to meet this demand, many vendors who previously provided only on-premises software or appliance-based solutions are jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon. However, are vendors really grasping the business implications and embracing the changes required to deliver cloud services? Or are they simply repositioning themselves as cloud providers? Just because you have a shovel and pan in gold country, does not make you a successful gold miner.

There are fundamental business changes required that often go overlooked until mistakes are made. Many businesses have to rethink their models and re-engineer their teams, as well as their products, from the ground up. During this time of profound change, these changes will be significant and run deep and wide throughout organizations."

You can read the full article at Information Management here:

Information Management: "The Great Cloud Rush of 2009" 

SaaS delivers SLA-backed solutions; Software delivers... just software

Posted by Craig Rennick, Founder and VP Sales

As a service provider of email archiving to enterprise customers, we pay great attention to customer service.  To this end, we talk to our customers frequently and schedule face-to-face senior level meetings to review our scorecard and get direct input on customer satisfaction. 

During our most recent road trip where I met some of our key customers, one of our customers summed it up perfectly when he said, “This is why we outsource to Fortiva, we want you stressing about this stuff – not us!”   Clearly we are upheld to scrutiny and standards that are beyond any one company’s capabilities to deliver in-house – and we expect that – I mean after all, why else outsource?   

In many of the calls I’ve been on, I continually hear about failed installations of on-premise software, like Enterprise Vault. What’s worse is that, I hear about them from prospects who have already invested time and money on software, built up a large archive, and are now having challenges keeping it running. And because change is difficult, IT administrators and users lower their expectations, apply band-aids and live with their situation. 

Then I think about Fortiva's customers and how they don’t need to tolerate unacceptable performance. They don’t need to accept less than desirable application effectiveness.  They also always have a provider working 7/24 to make things right and achieve industry leading SLA’s.  For example, Fortiva is the only provider in the email archiving industry that offers an SLA around search response time. To date, I have yet to come across an in-house IT department that would commit to any SLA’s for their own email archive.

No wonder we constantly hear extremely positive feedback from our customers.  Coming back from that week of customer visits, it reinforced why SaaS really is the wave of the future.  As a 15 year veteran VP Sales who now prescribes to SaaS for sales automation, I can see why IT will move in the same direction.

How SaaS Keeps Sales Honest - Honest Product Representation (Part 2 of 2)

Posted by Craig Rennick, Co-Founder and VP Sales

As VP Sales at Fortiva I oversee all prospect and customer contact; the sales process and then the on-going customer relationship falls into my camp. This means that we directly have to deliver, on an ongoing basis, what we sold. Expectations are set by us and then measured by our actual performance - ongoing.

Compare this to software vendors who make the sale and them move on. If you require training, help setting up and configuring the application, or if six months into the implementation you throw your hands up in desperation and call for on-site help it will cost you – big time. And then you’re into that familiar trap of throwing good money after bad in an effort to get the service running as it was demoed and promised during the slick presentation and sales push.

As a SaaS provider our pricing is all-inclusive and our work begins once we’ve made the initial sale. As a customer, you never lose the leverage you had as a buyer.  After the sale we monitor and support your business 7/24, we’re responsible for bug-fixing, upgrades, new releases and for adding those features that we promised we would during the sales process. Our pay-back comes over the long-term; our business model demands that we keep you a happy customer so that we make our margins over the long-haul.

Selling SaaS requires a different mind and skill-set than selling software. For us, customer relationships are on-going; we get closer to our customers than a software vendor ever would. As a SaaS provider we have to be totally upfront and honest with our prospects – it’s a new and refreshing paradigm that benefits buyers immensely.

When OnStar can upgrade my transmission, now THAT will be service...on second thought, why can't it?

Posted by Jeremy Hope, VP Operations

Got an interesting piece of post mail (yes paper still exists) the other day. A letter from General Motors informing me of a software upgrade that was available for the transmission system of my 2007 Acadia. It went on to detail that I did not have to have the upgrade applied at this time, however doing so would greatly improve the performance and comfort of my transmission. To apply the upgrade the letter asked me to contact my local dealer and setup an appointment to bring the Acadia into the Service Center. This is the part that struck me as odd.

One of the features that I pay yearly for is the OnStar® system, which provides remote access to my vehicle for everything from concierge services to remote diagnostics. My truck even emails me once a month to tell me how it is feeling (I’m waiting for it to email me to tell me to slow down – but that’s another blog). The question: why was it that this upgrade could not be applied thru the OnStar® system while the Acadia was parked in my driveway, avoiding the inconvenience of needing to travel to the dealership Service Center during business hours. This seemed like an obvious use of the technology that is at hand. Personally, I would be comfortable with this type of remote upgrade, as long as I was notified and could wake up to a better performing vehicle. But I had never been asked.

What makes this interesting to me, is that this letter sounded just like an email that our Service Center had just recently sent to our clients, informing them of an upgrade of their Archiving appliance. We too asked the client to contact our Service Center to book an appointment to setup a LiveMeeting® session to allow a technician to remotely connect to the Appliance to do the upgrade. At least we didn’t ask the client to bring the appliance into the shop!

But, here too technology exists that could allow us to securely remotely access and apply upgrades, and yet we are obliged to inconvenience the client to baby sit us through the upgrade process. This is done to provide the client with security as far as not having direct remote access to their appliances without them overseeing the activity. This is an SaaA/SaaS operational issue that we deal with on a daily basis: balancing the security needs of the client with simplification and reduction of the impact of change on clients. But I wonder, if we asked, how many clients would allow us to have remote access and say “just do the upgrade and wake me up when I have a better performing appliance”.

Time for a change...

Posted by Chris Tebo, CTO

Well, it’s been a while since I last wrote, but some changes are coming to ensure that there's a steady stream of posts to this blog.  Let me explain. The truth is that after writing this blog for a couple of months, I realized that finding the time to consistently post interesting and useful content was a pretty big challenge. While I didn’t want to give up the blog entirely, I also knew that I couldn’t keep up with the weekly posts I had hoped to write. So, I decided to re-evaluate how to make this blog work. 

After a lot of thought, I realized that there was a simple answer. There are a lot of people that I work with here at Fortiva that regularly share with me interesting, blog-worthy insights in our day-to-day interactions. I asked a few of those people if they would be interested in occasionally posting to my blog, and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. So, with that said, I decided to do two things. First, I am opening up the blog to other people at Fortiva to author posts. Secondly, since it won’t be “my” blog anymore, we are changing the name to “The Fortiva Blog”.

Ultimately, this merger has two benefits – it gives me the opportunity to continue blogging, without worrying as much about how often I post. At the same time, it will provide Fortiva with a company blog where we as an organization can openly discuss the industry events, ideas, activities that we’re dealing with every day. So thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy the new format as we move forward.