Dim Sum SaaS

Last week, my colleagues and I had a great dim sum lunch at Great Eastern Restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown. I recommend the restaurant; in addition to the great food, the experience inspired this post!

From the Wikipedia: “Dim Sum (touch the heart) is usually linked with the older tradition of Yum Cha (drinking tea), which has its roots in travellers on the ancient Silk Road needing a place to rest. Thus teahouses were established along the roadside. Rural farmers, exhausted after working hard in the fields, would also go to teahouses for a relaxing afternoon of tea. At first, it was considered inappropriate to combine tea with food, because people believed it would lead to excessive weight gain. People later discovered that tea can aid in digestion, so teahouse owners began adding various snacks.”

The advantage of dim sum, especially with a group, is that there are many different dishes to choose from. Rather than ordering individual dishes for themselves, everyone gets to try many dishes.

Software as a service (SaaS) is like dim sum, in that it’s so easy, quick, and usually inexpensive to get up and running with the number of users you need. It even provides an opportunity to easily try new applications, because there is no software and hardware to install, no large initial investment or commitment required, and there is often an opportunity to try the service for free.

In his article,  “BI for the Front Lines,” Birst Founder and CEO Brad Peters suggests making business intelligence available to more employees than only executives for decision making, and that SaaS BI is making this possible. Small investments in SaaS can be spread quickly across many users for rapid business results, improved communication and collaboration, and return on investment (ROI).

Consider these SaaS delicacies that you can quickly roll out to your users:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

The business results, ROI, and cost savings over on-premises alternatives that SaaS products can provide will touch the heart like dim sum and become a staple in your approach to addressing business needs with flexible, integrated, specialized, and efficient on-demand solutions.

What’s your favorite dim sum dish?

What types of SaaS applications would you like to add to your environment to quickly serve and satisfy changing business needs?