is your Business Saas-y?

There are more and more saas-y business women out there … Rosa Say at Say Leadership Coaching is one; and Jen Harwood at Direct Incite is definitely getting there, as are the girls (and guys) at Shopportunity.

What I’m talking about here is not an attitude (although all of these women definitely have a wonderfully positive and sassy attitude), what I’m talking about is an acronym.

Yep I know …. I can hear some of you sighing now “not another bloody technology acronym”.

Firstly, SaaS stands for “software as service”. In lay-woman’s terms it means that the software that you use is web-based vs box-based. If you want a wikipedia explanation have a look here.

Secondly, why should you care?

Have you thought what might happen in the following scenarios ….

1. Your working on a project with that requires in the input of others and you need to share documents, calendars, view designs, collaborate on proposals, track projects or share notes about who said what to which client. How do you do all that without having an endless stream of emails, word processing documents and spreadsheets that aren’t linked?
2. Your laptop goes missing or your computer hard-drive decides that it wants to take a holiday. Sure you’ve got all your data backed up (you do don’t you?) and you have all those software dics stored away in boxes. But do you have time available in the next 48-72 hours to load everything back onto your computer?

These are only 2 scenarios when having your software and your data stored on a web-based server provided by a sotware-as-a-service based company makes sense – but there are plenty more (drop a comment below if you can think of some other scenarios).

One of my favourite SaaS companies, wonderfully named Saasu, recently wrote a wonderful post on why Saas will prevail over software that highlighted for me one of the good reasons that I’m comfortable using web-based applications vs box-based applications.

Guards on the front door, hundreds of cameras, concrete all round – including the roof, biometric security, multiple levels of steel access doors and cages, multiple levels of redundant power, telecommunications and air conditioning

I know that as a small business owner, and a geeky one at that, even I can’t justify that level of commitment when it comes to my office-based technology. Thankfully the Saas services that I use do and I know that if I need to access these services from another computer, another office or in case of emergency it will be there. It also means that I can share access tothese services and the data with other people (like my clients and my accountant).

So let me share with you some of the SaaS that I use and love and also some others that you might find interesting.

My SaaS includes – NetAccounts (from Saasu), Basecamp and Highrise (from 37 Signals), Wordpress , Google Analytics, Campaign Monitor and MailBuild (from Freshview), FoxyCart, Flickr.

Some of the others to consider and keep an eye on – Picnik (image editing application), Free Agent (money management tool), Salesforce (high-end CRM tool but a little pricey for most small business), Typepad (blogging), Google Docs (office applications) … and the list goes on.

If you’re into the SaaS-y mode of working you business drop me a note and let me know what you favourites are.