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Buildium Report Issues Guidelines while Selecting SaaS Vendors

By Mini Swamy
TMCnet Contributor

Today, companies are increasingly subscribing to software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) solutions to meet specific business needs. Buildium, a provider of property management software, released a report titled “Avoiding a SaaS Disaster: Questions to ask when evaluating SaaS vendors.”

"Customers often ask us how they should go about evaluating cloud-based services like ours," said Buildium Co-Founder Michael Monteiro, in a press release."This report suggests a number of important questions to ask and will ultimately help customers find the cloud service that's right for them."

The report, while acknowledging the many benefits of SaaS solutions, especially when compared to traditional on-premise applications, cautions companies to select their SaaS vendors with care. Failure to do so, it said could result in unreliable performance, poor support and even in loss of data.

Prepared for Buildium by SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors, the report highlights the potential advantages of lower costs, rapid deployment and greater flexibility of SaaS solutions, as factors that could be very tempting for companies to embrace without doing adequate homework.

Companies should realize that by choosing the SaaS vendor, the onus of control is simply transferred from the company to the vendor. During the life of the subscription, the company will be forced to rely completely on the vendor to protect its data, provide support, keep the business running and add new features.

All this makes it doubly important to make the choice carefully. The report recommends that companies considering SaaS solutions assess the vendor's track record on security, data backup, performance, uptime, support and upgrade before committing themselves. In addition, they should also take a look at the kind of experience the vendor has, the reputation and stability record that he commands.

More importantly, it was essential to ascertain whether the vendor understood the specific needs of the business and determine the extent of their knowledge and commitment.

SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors is an advisory services firm that helps software-as-a-service companies acquire and retain customers.

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