Recently, I wrote about why now is the perfect time to build the SaaS business you've been dreaming about. As you outline your business idea and build your SaaS product, you must include include the right features if you want your solution to rapidly take off.
The article “8 features all enterprise SaaS applications must have” offers great advice for SaaS vendors on what features to include.
First, bake in security, including privacy and GDPR compliance. (GDPR is the European Union law governing data protection.) But that kind of basic security should just be a minimum. SaaS solutions should go beyond that, says George Lawrie, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.
He believes, "SaaS providers must, of course, comply with regulations like GDPR and secure the data against theft and the programs against unauthorized users. But, in my experience, enterprises look for something more. They want to determine the geography in which their data will be held -- sometimes, for reasons of national security, sometimes, for fear of future exposure to class actions."
SaaS products also need to scale easily and quickly, and should integrate with other SaaS solutions as well. So says Nick Brigman, vice president of digital strategy and client enablement at CompuCom, an IT managed services company.
"SaaS apps need suitable design to support multithreading so that thousands of users can work in the same application simultaneously," he says.
It’s also vital that SaaS business applications be interoperable with other SaaS applications as well as cloud services and enterprise applications such as CRM (customer relationship management), says Lawrie.
He warns, “Your application no longer lives in isolation from other applications and business processes. For enterprise applications to be taken seriously, they need to be able to easily integrate with other applications as a company scales."
Other SaaS features that are vital to include are identify management, redundancy, configurability and analytics.
And especially vital is ease of use, says Matt Graney, vice president of product at Celigo, which sells integration technology to connect cloud applications.
Graney believes that the purchase and implementation of SaaS applications should be so easy that it can be done by line-of-business leaders instead of IT.
He says, "Vendors that have software that can provide enterprise capabilities but doesn't require a dedicated staff to purchase and implement it are the ones whose software will get purchased more frequently."
Choose the Right Platform To Build and Deploy Your SaaS Application
To do all that, of course, you’ll need the best platform for building and maintaining your SaaS applications. Alpha Anywhere is ideal for the task. It includes everything you need to build and deploy applications at an affordable price. You get an Alpha Anywhere development license, an Alpha Cloud subscription and a SQL database for testing and deploying your application. View examples of entrepreneurs who have build successful SaaS businesses with Alpha Anywhere.
Comment