9 Questions every SaaS vendor needs to be able to answer

I've interviewed a number of large enterprise CIOs lately. I've also spoken with some CIOs who are either clients our firm or consulting clients of our partners. In those latter conversations, the CIOs were questioning me and I was doing the answering.

Their questions were actually quite enlightening particular for those vendors who sell software as a service (SaaS) solutions to large enterprise CIOs. In brief, the questions they asked showed me that these companies will be taking on more cloud-based applications but that cloud vendors still have additional education in risk mitigation ahead of them if they wish to finish winning over the hearts of large enterprise CIOs.

So what did they ask me?

- Cloud to on premise integration of applications must be better than what many CIOs must live with the current integration services tools sold to CIOs and their on premise applications today. These CIOs are not happy with the current on-premise to on-premise integration options available to them and want assurances that newer cloud apps will behave better, integrate better and stay integrated

- How am I expected to roll out a cloud-based application suite globally when cloud adoption rates are greatest in North America, less so in Western Europe and even less are still in some other parts of the world? CIOs want help selling the concept of the cloud and SaaS to others in their far-flung empires.

- Do cloud vendors and the software application vendors building cloud applications understand and have solutions to deal with local information regulations? Specifically how will a cloud vendor assure CIOs that personal employee data in Germany stays on cloud servers in Germany and is not virtually moved around to other cloud computing centers?

- Why are older on premise vendors still fixated on their SOA technology stack ease and so late in developing full blown cloud applications?

- When will larger application suites appear on the cloud?

- Are the product extensibility and platform developmental capabilities that cloud-based application vendors speak of really as powerful as the vendors claim them to be?

- What do I tell my IT staff, particularly those that maintain older on premise applications, that the days of them needing to upgrade old applications to newer releases may be coming to an end? Who is going to help us with this change management, skills and training problem?

- Will user and business analysts now be able to not just extend cloud applications but maybe even build additional applications without IT involvement? How can IT control that?

- How does IT ensure that business analysts don't unnecessarily expose corporate data to authorized cloud application users?

And those were just the questions from the first half hour of one of these briefings. While I dealt with these questions reasonably well, I do believe cloud-based application software vendors may need to create more thought leadership and educational pieces for the senior IT technology buyers in the market today. These executives are hungry for answers and will need to have risk mitigated for many projects before any SaaS projects can be green-lighted.

On-premise vendors will see the sorts of questions above as an opportunity to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) into the mindset of IT executives. Unfortunately for them, CIOs see through many of these tactics as a poor salesmanship tactic. In fact, that sort of fear mongering has been going on for some time. It's not working well.

On-demand software vendors have a duty to their own firms as well as to the space in general to dispel or rebut these concerns.