On Demand. Straight Up. The Demand Solutions Group Newsletter

< Back to DSG Library, Newsletters	2010 Q2

It’s interesting to look back and see how reality sometimes – or is that, usually? – differs from what we expected. When we formed DSG, the driver for on-demand solutions was the lower initial costs and total cost of ownership relative to on-premise solutions but, five years later, it’s apparent that the conversation has shifted from lower costs to a more strategic set of drivers.

Our experience with over a hundred and fifty successful on-demand projects, tells us that on-demand’s greatest financial benefit is not actually its lower cost: on-demand’s major financial benefit is that on-demand lets you reap the business value of your solutions investment more quickly. In the words of the marketing fraternity, it offers better time-to-value. Your business solutions are up-and-running more quickly and therefore your targeted business benefits are achieved more quickly. We are consistently seeing complete on-demand ERP systems going live in 10-12 weeks, not the typical 10-12 months of an on-premise solution.

The second major benefit is that IT becomes a service to your organization not an intrinsic part of it. Just as you would prefer not to build a power station to be able to use electricity, why should you have to build an IT organization with the provisioning of hardware, loading and configuring of operating systems, databases, etc. just to be able to run a business application. Should IT be a core competency? I think most would prefer not.

A third benefit that we and our customers see is real value out of packaged software purchases. I’m sure that you remember the old sales pitch about enhancements and new versions of the software? I’m equally sure that when many of you thought about the business disruption and risk of implementing a new software version, you decided to stay with the one that was already installed and working! With on-demand, this issue goes away: the vendor bears the costs and risks of implementing new features; all you see is new functionality delivered without any aggravation or hassle to your desktop. You are always on the latest version with an ability to leverage all of the greatest and latest capabilities. Good bye scary 6 month upgrade activities.

Looking back over the evolution of this market, the positioning of on-demand has matured from its low cost roots, through a more sophisticated time-to-value message, to where we should now talk about the strategic value of on-demand solutions as they continually evolve to deliver higher and higher levels of business value.

Please enjoy the rest of the newsletter and pay special attention to the Customer Focus section where we outline several customers that have enjoyed the time to value of On Demand solutions.

Todd Fitzwater, Principal and Co-founder

DSG Webinar Series
As you may know, DSG runs regular webinars to update customers on topics that help them get more value out of their on-demand investments. These webinars are recorded and can be accessed under the “Company” tab on the DSG website. A recent webinar focused on how to leverage the capabilities of the MyDials product for analytics and dashboarding. MyDials is a unique product that has an out of the box data integration and solution integration with NetSuite. View the webinar here.

Summer '10 Salesforce.com Release Highlights
Salesforce.com’s Summer ’10 release includes many significant new enhancements the most obvious of which is Chatter which brings a social media approach to the sales collaboration process. Chatter functionality includes Facebook-style user profiles that allow users to follow or un-follow posts related to colleagues, teams and groups and status changes on accounts opportunities on the web on their Blackberry and iPhone mobiles.

Salesforce.com is also rebranding around the “cloud” theme, their core Salesforce system is now known as SalesCloud, and features the following enhancements:

Quote Templates – this extends the quote functionality introduced in the Spring ’10 release to enable users to create your own quote templates.

Enhanced Lookup Filters – this also builds on a basic feature introduced in the Spring ’10 release and allows users to limit the selection of a lookup field or search dialog through selection criteria for example, to limit the lookup of contacts to only those contacts related to the Account page that they are on when they start the Lookup.

Dashboard Enhancements – there are two significant new dashboard enhancements in this release. Firstly, Dynamic Dashboards means that the dashboards can be shared and reflects the user data that is running the report. Secondly, Drag and Drop Dashboard Builder allows dashboards to be easily built from a WYSIWIG palette.

Sales Cloud Scheduler – this is a very useful new feature that supports sending meeting invites to customers from within SalesCloud and for customers to confirm acceptance of the proposed time or request a different meeting time.

As always with Salesforce.com releases, there are many new features included in Summer '10 release. Be sure to check out the release notes or contact DSG for more details.


		New Revenue Recognition Rules As you probably know, new Revenue Recognition rules are coming into effect that significantly – and positively - impact how you recognize revenue from complex or bundled products and services. DSG is partnering with NetSuite to deliver a fully compliant Revenue Recognition solution with no custom coding, no reliance on Excel or other workarounds, and no compliance based risk. To find out more about how these rules impact your business, please contact us or download a highly informative report written by NetSuite’s CFO, Jim McGeever, from www.demandsolutionsgroup.com/revrec. Additionally, DSG will be holding a webinar for our customers on June 30 at 9am. If you are not a customer and are interested in attending, please contact sales@demandsolutionsgroup.com.

Since the theme of this Newsletter is the strategic value that on-demand solutions deliver, we thought we’d feature three customer successes that highlight different aspects of on-demand’s strategic and business value.

DSG Customer Success Update — eMeter

eMeter, the leading supplier of Smart Grid management platforms ,went live with NetSuite on July 1st 2009 after a 3 month implementation that included migrating 10 years of data from QuickBooks, a big issue for many of DSG’s new customers. Joe Artale at eMeter told us “When you’re faced with a big migration project you’re mostly worried that the historic data is there and that it is correct. DSG were very thorough in how they handled this. We just went through our first audit with no issues and we’re very happy with our decision to go with DSG and NetSuite”. Please read the full success story on the DSG website.

DSG Customer Success Snapshot — Easy Office

Easy Office provides outsourced bookkeeping services to NonProfits that improve the accuracy and efficiency of NonProfits accounting processes and frees up their staff to focus on mission-related work. After a two month implementation project, the Boise-based company now has a complete NetSuite sales, support and financials solution that provides a solid foundation for their future growth. One of the specific problems that DSG addressed was Easy Office’s invoicing; before implementing this system it took several days at month-end to consolidate all of the project based billings onto a single monthly invoice for each customer and this can now be done automatically in a matter of minutes not days.

DSG Customer Success Snapshot — Silver Spring Networks

Silver Spring Networks provides intelligent monitoring devices and Smart Grid management solutions - DSG delivered their third project to Silver Spring Networks recently. After two Salesforce.com support projects focused on deploying a customer portal that allowed self-monitoring of SLAs, this third project extended Salesforce.com to provide Silver Springs Networks' sales team with a forecasting and opportunity management system that supports Blackberry and iPhone access and sales activity dashboards. This series of projects shows the ability of on-demand to start as a point-solution and to be rapidly expanded to deliver much wider business value.


		Demand Solutions Group is a privately owned consulting firm that sells and tailors on-demand ERP, CRM, and eBusiness solutions to deliver maximum business value for clients. The company provides a range of road-mapping, launch, revitalization, and optimization services for leading on-demand software packages. Demand Solutions Group serves businesses that range from start-up companies to members of the Fortune 100, and is based in Silicon Valley, California. For more information, please visit www.demandsolutionsgroup.com.