Allow me to offer a premise: The SMB market for software is classically underserved and is absolutely enormous with tens of millions of customers up for grabs.
Allow me to offer another one: The vast majority of SMBs have limited or non-existent IT resources and are inherently late adopters of innovative software technologies.
If the premises are true, then the question is begged: How can providers of software-as-a-service (SaaS) dramatically shorten the adoption curve and motivate millions of SMBs to adopt new technologies sooner?
The answer, my friends, is not “blowing in the wind” -- rather it resides with young and nimble SaaS providers capable of engaging and executing innovative channel distribution strategies.
Companies such as EchoSign, which has announced plans to embed their web based contract execution and management service within H&R Block’s 2008 version of Home & Business Attorney. Now, almost any of the hundreds of business forms can be electronically or fax signed in seconds via EchoSign – with signed copies automatically stored online to find and use later.
Others such as Be Professional in the UK have taken equally innovative steps by partnering with Peter Jones, one of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs and star of the hit BBC
television series “Dragons’ Den,” to launch a online suite of SaaS business tools which will be available exclusively in all branches of PC World, the UK’s leading chain of computing
retail superstores.
And my company, SMBLive, which has found initial success by partnering with incumbent telecom providers such as British Telecom to distribute innovative SaaS solutions which dramatically increase the value of “broadband lines” and “directory listings” by merging them into a modern marketing platform for SMBs.
It’s still early, and it will definitely take some time – but companies such as EchoSign, Be Professional, and SMBLive are aggressively pushing the edge of the SaaS distribution envelope – which is fundamentally creating new and different ways for SMB to adopt SaaS sooner.