Earlier this week I meet with a good friend of mine (who we’ll call Martin) who works as a Director of Professional Services. Martin works at a global enterprise software company. We’d been discussing a recent article I wrote on Cloud Migrations in Reverse and we discussed why he had seen some of his customers migrate from their SaaS offering back to their on premises products.
For the last 10 or so years traditional enterprise software companies have been working with their customers towards their SaaS offerings. The biggeest reason for software vendors to do this is that it is easier for the vendor to support their customers, when they also manage the environment. The strategy for Martin has been to retrain his professional services consultants to become (Technical) Customer Success Managers. The nature SaaS means that customers can churn at any point before the customer lifetime value exceeds the cost to acquire. CSMs work with customers achieve and maintain value from the as a service offering is in play.
Martin explained to me that his companies SaaS solution is a win-win for customers and vendors. He also sees a trend with certain types of customers reversing their decision, or indefinitely delaying go-live for three main reasons:
- Poor planning
- Changes in user experience
- Data sovereignty and legal challenges
Poor Planning
I think we could consider all three of these as poor planning, but what Martin meant by this was that the customer assumes that migrating is an easy task and neglects to consult across teams including LOB (Line Of Business) heads and bring in professional help to perform the migration. The outcome of this can mean that data is not migrated correctly, and data inconsistencies.
Changes in User Experience
Changes as a result of where application is hosted or insufficient user training for newer releases resulting in users being having a poor user experience. I’ve talked a lot about how latency can really impact application performance in Performance Diagnostics Part 1.
Data Sovereignty and Legal Challenges
Martin outlined that some of his customers moved to their SaaS offering and found that they ran into problems with Personally identifiable information (PII) being stored in localities outside the locations specified by legislation. Not every SaaS provider will have a tenancy or can gaurantee that data may stay in a specific location. Sometimes the law, and peoples interpretations of the law can lag behind technology.
Martin did say that almost all of his customers are looking to eventually end in SaaS as an end state. His Professional Services team are busy advising and working with their customers to achieve that.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this article you can buy me a coffee or buy yourself a book.
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