A Blog About Software As A Service
This blog is all about software as a service (SaaS) for business. If it is in the cloud, you will find it here.
-
SEO In The Real World
Posted on June 22nd, 2009 No commentsYou know you may have a problem when you see something when driving and think "Wow. That’s a good example of search engine optimization." You are certain that you have a problem when you then take a photo of said location and blog about it.
The photo:
I apologize for the quality of the image. It was rainy, I was using my iPhone and I was in a moving car. Not the optimal conditions.
I saw the location as a web site, and the entrance you see here is their home page. The other entrance is right by the white car you can see underneath the sign. That’s a landing page.
Here’s what we see on the home page:
- Vegetables Flowers and Plants- This is their page headline, and they’re using an <H1> tag around it.
- Northshore Flower Exchange- This is their page title and the name of the site
- Plants and Flowers- This is their subheadline. They believe that the majority of people searching for what they offer use the words "Vegetables flowers & plants", but know that some people search for just "plants and flowers", leaving out vegetables all together.
On the landing page they have the same sign as #1. It feels like a landing page, as you can’t actually get into the parking lot there. You have to follow the call to action and drive around to get in. I’m reasonably certain that if they had a third road-facing side, they would have another large sign that says "Plants and Flowers". You know, for A/B testing purposes.
-
Marketing Profs B-to-B Forum 2009
Posted on June 8th, 2009 No comments
Happy Monday.The good people over at MarketingProfs were kind enough to give yours truly a press pass for the 2009 Marketing Profs Business-to-Business Forum here in Boston. So I’ll be checking out all the sessions today and will be covering them on a few of my blogs: Blogstring.com, MarketingStartups.com, and BtoBSaaS.com.
The sessions I think I’ll be checking out:
9:00 am- 10:15 am- Bringing SEO In-House Without Missing a Beat
10:15- I’ll be running out to my car to feed the meter so I don’t get a ticket (fingers crossed)
10:45- 12:00- Developing Robust Online Content To Keep Prospects and Customers Engaged
1:45- 3:00- Make Every Investment Count: The Measure of Marketing
3:30-4:45- Putting Measurements into Action to Improve Leads, Conversions and ROI
After that, looks like there’s a cocktail thing and a dinner, which should be excellent.
I’ve decided to shy away from the Social Media types of sessions, as I’ve been to LOTS of them lately. So, if you’re here, be sure to say hello.
-
SaaS For IT Management
Posted on April 28th, 2009 1 commentEver since I joined Aprigo in March of 2009 (ahem, last month), I’ve been developing our inbound marketing plan. With that, I’ve been doing a lot of keyword and topic research, and have been amazed at the amount of attention being paid to software as a service (SaaS) for IT management. Let me explain.
First, a little background on me.
<background>
After graduating college, I went to work full-time as the marketing guy/webmaster/web developer at a high tech law firm in Boston. Though I was part of their IT department, I was really somewhat detached from the other IT folks. I was the web guy, so I really wasn’t part of ops. But it was an excellent experience, getting to work on the marketing side, the development side, and getting to understand the IT side all at the same time. I started a blog called lawfirmblogging.com, and really started to get into the social media and web marketing racket. The blog started to get a lot of attention, and I realized that’s what I really wanted to get into.
After 7 years, I was itching to join a startup. I joined matchmine in April of 2007 as their Web Community Evangelist. I’d moved to the B-to-C side of things and was working on promoting a company that was offering something for free. Again, awesome, awesome experience, and I learned a lot about building a user base, user acquisition, and inbound marketing. The company shut down in October of 2008.
After matchmine, I consulted for a few months until I joined Aprigo. So I’ve gone from a law firm to a B-to-C startup to a B-to-B SaaS company focused on IT Management. There. That’s my story in a nutshell. Onto the point.
</background>
Now that the mini-bio is out of the way, let’s get to the meat of this thing. The idea that SaaS tools focused on IT Management are all the rage. Now, don’t just take my word for it, let’s look at what the experts are saying:
In this article, Andrew Conry-Murray talks about the move toward SaaS-ifying (just made that sucker up) IT managment. From the piece:A subset of IT management startups are taking the SaaS or hybrid-SaaS route, which promises simpler deployment than traditional premises software. Companies such as Paglo, which is aimed at small businesses, and Service-now.com, which targets Global 2000 customers, use the SaaS model to provide a variety of IT management services.
A new report from Forrester forecasts the future of this market. (You can read a summary here.) At present, it says SaaS-based IT management accounts for a measly 1% of IT management software. But by 2013, the report anticipates SaaS vendors will have a modest 10% of the market.
While those numbers probably don’t have the Big Four (BMC (NYSE: BMC), IBM (NYSE: IBM) Tivoli,HP (NYSE: HPQ), and CA (NSDQ: CA)) trembling, another figure might: Forrester predicts that enterprises with 1,000 or more employees will account for 50% of SaaS installations in 2009.
These are really interesting figures to me, as the SaaS model makes a lot of sense for the mid-market to small(er) size IT departments…as much as the Global 2000 companies.Here’s an excerpt from the Forrester article cited in the InformationWeek story:How Big Is SaaS In IT Management Software?
by Peter O’Neill
with Stefan Ried, Ph.D., Reedwan IqbalSoftware-as-a-service (SaaS) is disrupting the IT management software market. Incumbent software vendors are setting up new business units and adding SaaS offerings to existing portfolios; managed service providers are repositioning their offerings to leverage the trend; and new pure-play SaaS operators are extending their success by taking advantage of product churn in various established vendors’ service and asset management customer bases. Forrester has developed a market forecast model for IT management SaaS that shows that SaaS will grow from making up just over 1% of the $18 billion IT management software market in 2008 to 10% by 2013, by which time many of the brand SaaS providers could be well established.Like I said, it’s just an excerpt. If you want to read the whole article, it’ll cost you $749.I may be biased, but the SaaS model just makes sense. If you’re at a gigantic company with the resources (both in personnel and finance) to constantly install, monitor and patch hardware and software that is supposed to manage your data (think about that for a second), then a SaaS solution might not make much sense to you. But if you’re at a company that is constantly putting out fires, has a small IT group managing a LOT of data, and don’t have the time or money to support new IT Management software, then I’d imagine the subscription-based SaaS model sounds pretty attractive.But again, I’m biased.
