It’s All About Choice, The Customer’s Choice
When I read GigaOM’s Mike Jones’s great contribution to the growing discussions on the future of SaaS, one thought kept going through my mind. Who’s taking the customer side in this discussion? So far the SaaS vs. XaaS discussion is mostly a technical and infrastructure discussion. “Acronyms as a Service” is a great idea, but really, shouldn’t it come down to giving customers choices?
It’s not up to our industry to dictate what solution customers should use. It’s up to us to create the solutions that enable customers to choose the right deployment model that meets their specific requirements. For some customers that will be SaaS, for others that will be IaaS or PaaS.
So to add to the discussion and focus it a bit more on CRM, what customers need is choice:
- The choice to freely move their data between different clouds;
- The choice to where they want to deploy their CRM instance;
- The choice to integrate with any open social platform;
- The choice to access their CRM solution from any mobile platform;
- The choice to change their CRM when they run against the limitations that come with legacy CRM solutions; both on-premise as well as SaaS.
And for that CRM needs to be open. Today, SugarCRM is the only solution in the market that is open and built for the cloud. This flexibility offers customers choice.