Four CIOs Talk About SaaS Adoption

Choosing to migrate to a software-as-a-service approach to technology takes patience, good timing, and in some cases a lot of faith that the benefits will outweigh the risks. Those were the key lessons one group of CIOs revealed during a panel discussion at a Salesforce.com conference this week.

Chief executives from four companies -- Wells Fargo, Symantec, SurfControl, and Schumacher Group of Louisiana -- bared their SaaS souls on Tuesday in an attempt to educate other IT decisionmakers about how to make the leap to on-demand software. The panel was sponsored by Salesforce.com, which is a SaaS provider, and all four panelists were Salesforce.com customers.

That said, each of the panelists acknowledged that their decision to try SaaS in any form could apply to more than a dozen other vendors whose products don't come shrink-wrapped. The point was well-received by an audience full of representatives from companies with more than 1,000 employees.

Despite their different situations, the common theme among the four panelists was that each had been reading about SaaS products for some time and each considered browser-based products as an alternative to their existing systems.

The Schumacher Group of Louisiana, an emergency medicine management firm based in Lafayette, La., was contemplating adopting a SaaS product in 2005 when two hurricanes -- Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita -- came ashore, according to chief information officer Doug Menefee.

The Group provides patient and physician management services including Cobra and EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) to many of the surrounding hospitals hit by the hurricanes. The company had an existing homegrown system at the time and was looking at moving to a different data center or shift to an on-demand model. Although it looked like the Group made a knee-jerk decision, Menefee said the company had spent the previous three to four months comparing SaaS products against Microsoft products. The team used the two hurricanes as the catalyst to make the switch, Menefee said, against the recommendations of some key employees.

"We went against what the developers wanted to do and went with the recommendation of senior executive management," Menefee said. "Because it is a paradigm shift, there was a learning curve. But now I have a creative development team instead of one that gets to write code all day long. Symantec found a different catalyst to push toward a SaaS-based systems, said Sanjay Saraf, VP of Symantec's Front Office IT. The $13 billion acquisition of Veritas meant having to choose a common platform for the marketing, sales, and services departments.

After a six-month decision process, Saraf said the company decided to move away from its in-house software, even though Symantec had a more-established backend system.

"They decided to take a fresh look at driving the innovation fast," Saraf said. "It was a tough decision and a bold solution to throw it all away. At the end of the day, we brought the two companies on a common platform and 5,500 users online in four months."

Saraf's other advice to potential SaaS customers is to pay attention to data migration and data maintenance to make sure the data is kept up, make sure there is a good change management solution, and make sure the executives are tracking usage and keeping up on the changes.

The international bank Wells Fargo has taken a more incremental route towards using SaaS products. Basil Fedynyshyn, VP of Platform Strategy, told the audience that the company considered a shift because they were looking for technology options that Wells Fargo didn't have in its own internal systems.

"We needed to change with our IT partners on some pressing business needs and there were no IT resources available to us. ... We were looking for a commitment, albeit incrementally," Fedynyshyn said.

The bank gathered several SaaS experts and engaged them in several rounds of questions. After a six-month review, Fedynyshyn said the company began talking to Salesforce.com and initially rolled out the product to 100 of its employees. The longest point of the rollout took four months, because of due diligence, he said.

Internet filtering and desktop security software maker SurfControl was in a spot of financial trouble (negative 2% annual growth) just before it jumped to SaaS products, Max Rayner, CIO and executive VP of Products & Services told the crowd.

In addition to saving money, Rayner said the company decided within two months to adopt a browser-based software model to attract new talent.

"When we started asking around for new bright talent -- especially sales people -- many pointed out that they were not interested in GoldMine [customer relationship management software] but they were looking for something a little more industry standard," Rayner said.

SurfControl managed to stage a worldwide tech replacement of its legacy systems with Salesforce.com products over five time zones within one hour, he added.