SaaS

Earlier in the week we wrote about the brave transition that Basware made from old school to new school thinking on software sales. To many if not most who take an interest in enterprise software, whether that’s from an end user or buyer point of view or from a software supplier point of view, the case for SaaS ranges from attractive to compelling. But there seems to be a significant community that remains wedded to the old school way of thinking. I sit on the end user/buyer side of the fence and, for the benefit of those old schoolers on the other side of the fence, I’d like to describe from personal experience, the contrast between the two models, not from a functional perspective but from from a commercial relationship perspective.

I recently made some comments about Basware that were somewhat critical. It was positive, constructive criticism. I wanted to point out that Basware was ideally placed to become a monster. With one of it’s largest competitors sidelined somewhat by their acquisition by SAP, Basware could fall into the trap of becoming complacent – indeed, I have , from personal experience seen hints of this on the horizon. But I overlooked something – something that to an observer from outside of their organization could go unnoticed. It is the astonishing turn-around that Basware has performed, the foresight they have shown making that change and the energy and determination they have exhibited in completing it.

Basware have just made a very interesting announcement and launched Alusta, a “cloud-based platform for business-to-business transaction collaboration." According to their announcement yesterday, Alusta (Finnish for "platform") provides "open, centralized access to all Basware services via a scalable, secure, open collaborative commerce ecosystem for buying and supplying organizations of every size and location." If it lives up to half of the hype, this will be a truly impressive platform. Alusta isn’t ground breaking. It isn’t even new thinking but what it promises is to bring together a wide set of leading edge tools technologies and techniques to create a purchase to pay platform that could be world beating. That’s the promise anyway. So what’s it got that’s so impressive?

There are two types of people. Those who get twitter and those who don't. It's genetic. You may or may not get why it’s important to purchasing professionals but whether you are a social networker or not there are some extremely valuable lessons to be learned from the twittersphere and one lesson in particular that some of you are not going to like.