SaaS, cloud and subscription billing and the Olympics in 2010

2010 is looking pretty exciting for us. We had a great 2009 as our business in the SaaS and Cloud billing market really took off.

On top of that, the 2010 winter Olympics are about to kick off in our corporate hometown of Vancouver so the mood around the Monexa office is pretty good.

So, what's happening in 2010 for us? Gartner is fully on board with the SaaS and Cloud Computing market. In fact, they have named Cloud Computing as one of the top 10 strategies for 2010:

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. Cloud-based services can be exploited in a variety of ways to develop an application or a solution. Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others. In addition, consuming cloud services enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners. Read the full gartner comment

Monexa is a SaaS Application itself and many of our customers are SaaS/Cloud companies. As you can imagine, we're deeply connected to the overall growth of the SaaS community and not just our subscription billing market. Past failure to predict the future has never gotten in the way of trying again. So, here's what we think 2010 will look like:

• Vendors, Vendors, Vendors
  •  Although the leading SaaS provider Salesforce has reached over $1 billion in revenue, Microsoft and Google are big players; 2010 will be marked as the year that new vendors and applications hit the mainstream. Microsoft will be pushing the Azure platform to their army of ISV's so we expect to see a ton of new cloud services out of that group.
    
• End User Uptake
  •  With more and more cool apps hitting the market, it will be the end user that decides the success of the market. As market players we need to work together to demonstrate reliability, convenience and value for the consumer dollar. Further, as we have seen with Google and Microsoft we need to provide better Service Level Agreements if we expect the enterprise to jump fully on-board.
    
• Customer Service
  • A key differentiation in the market will be good old fashion customer service. Just because you can create an application that can be used by anyone in the world does not give application providers a free ride on customer service. A vendor might be able to get away with little customer service or a help desk forum on their site when they offer the service for free but enterprise customers expect more.
• Taxation of online services 
  •  An unknown in the market is how the each state will tax cloud services. There are rumblings even now that new taxation rules will be introduced soon. This will have a big impact on not only our business but the entire cloud market.
    

Monexa will continue be a leader in the Cloud billing market and we look to 2010 as a great year for the market and our company.

As we move into 2010 - what are your predictions? Link us to your blog posts on the subject...

Comments

[Greytip Online]

"...it will be the end user that decides the success of the market" well said. 2010 would create more opportunities in SaaS business it seems, especially in SMB space.

Let's expect 2010 as one of the best years for SaaS