Partner Points
RCPmag.com Readers Respond
Small (biz) complaint; software as a service advocate speaks up; sold on selling tips.
License Management Made Easy
[In reference to Paul DeGroot's Directions column, "
My
Dog Ate My License," May 2006], given Microsoft's supposed
major push for the [small to midsize business] SMB market, I do
not understand why they don't make it easier for SMBs to purchase
the software in North America.
The "Open Value Subscription Option" is exactly what
a lot of U.S. SMB customers want. It's simple, they only have to
think about it once per year and they can spread their payments
out. Most clients that I work with want to be compliant with their
licenses, but find it impossible to do so. The Open Value Subscription
Option could help make it easy for them, but it is not available
in North America.
U.S. customers are saddled with the company-wide option and the
standard option. I think that if they opened this option up to U.S.
SMBs they would find a lot of takers. Customers just want license
management to be easy. Even customers with 100 PCs want options
to simply re-up once per year with an accurate count of desktops.
Dealing with Windows and Office licenses every time you purchase
two to three PCs is a nightmare and they simply don't want to have
to deal with that. I have never seen anyone from Microsoft explain
why this option is available worldwide, except in North America.
Josh Krueger
Bloomington, Ill.
SaaS Companies Really Do Care
I disagree with Christopher Bell's comments [see "Partner
Points," April 2006]. A SaaS company cares about your data
as much as you do because a SaaS company will no longer be in business
if it does not.
Because you pay monthly, instead of upfront, and because we need
to have many happy customers to be successful (low price-point,
high volume is the name of the game), our interests are aligned
with yours.
My company is a SaaS e-learning and webcasting company. It would
only take a few unhappy customers to trash our company and spread
the word to others. Not caring about you is not caring about our
own success.
And I would bet, in our example as an e-learning SaaS provider,
that we have much more experience caring for and managing e-learning
data than our customers do. We eat, sleep and breathe this stuff
every day.
Peter Cervieri
New York, N.Y.
Inside Information
I found this article ["Reaching
the Decision Maker," April 2006] very interesting. I really
liked the part about deliberately dialing the wrong extension and
then saying, "Oh, I was trying to reach 'Joe CEO.'"
I work "outside sales" in risk management and used to
limit my prospects to companies where I knew that the only person
I would need to talk to were the owners themselves. Since I started
receiving this magazine and the Redmond Partner Update newsletter,
that is changing. And it's all thanks to inside information like
this. Keep up the good work. It's very appreciated.
Rollin Walter
Salem, Ore.