SAS held its annual Global Forum conference this week, which marked the company’s 40th anniversary. One key to its long-lived success was an early decision to sell software by annual subscription, rather than the one-time perpetual license standard in the industry when SAS started. This provided a steady income stream and focused attention on customer satisfaction to ensure renewals.
In recent years, much of the software industry has adopted a subscription model under the label of “Software as a Service” (SaaS). But the triumph of SAS’s pricing approach has been accompanied by new challenges to SAS’s business. Subscription pricing notwithstanding, SAS has largely sold its software for on-premise operation by its clients and required them to purchase a large stack of core technologies. This demanded a high initial investment but made expansion relatively easy – an approach that made sense when SAS's core analytical applications were pretty much essential to many clients. By contrast, the new SaaS vendors run software on their own servers and allow clients to access it remotely. This greatly reduces implementation effort and allows volume-based pricing, both of which lower entry costs to the client. The new SaaS software has also been relatively easy to integrate with other systems through open APIs and standard scripting languages such as Python. This also makes it easier to sell SaaS applications for narrow tasks rather than as part of a massive suite.
SAS’s growth and financial performance have been just fine despite the new competition, thanks to technical leadership in its core analytical products and pry-it-from-my-cold-dead-hands loyalty of its core customers. But the benefits of the new SaaS systems have made new sales harder, especially in peripheral markets such as marketing applications.
I’ve subjected you to this long-winded exposition because it provides context for SAS’s major announcement at its conference: a true SaaS version called SAS Viya.* This is a cloud-native system** that will reproduce existing SAS functionality and be compatible with the existing SAS 9 products. More exciting than the cloud deployment (which SAS had previously offered for SAS 9), Viya will be accessible through open APIs and scripting languages including Python, Java, and Lua, and – gasp – some components will be offered as on-demand services. In the SAS universe, this is truly revolutionary. It should open the door to new clients who were not likely to invest in a conventional SAS implementation. Initial Viya apps will be available in third quarter 2016.
For marketers in particular, SAS also announced Customer Intelligence 360, a SaaS version of its primary marketing suite. Like Viya, this is a separate product from the existing Customer Intelligence 6 suite, which will continue to be offered. The initial release is not a function-for-function duplicate of CI 6 but a “digital marketing hub” that delivers real-time messages in digital channels (email, Web, and mobile apps). Key features include customer-level data collection via on-page scripts, and applications for marketing tasks such as sending an email, delivering in-app messages, or building Web a/b tests. These applications combine previously separate SAS functions such as model building, visual analytics, segmentation, and content creation. They include some nifty advanced features such as recommending when to run tests and automatically discovering which customer segments are most responsive to each test version. The initial CI 360 release includes two modules, Discover (mobile and Web reporting) and Engage (digital interactions including testings). They will eventually be followed by marketing resource management. CI 360 works on a very flexible customer data hub, although that’s a separate product owned by SAS’s Master Data Management group.
CI 360 uses much of the same technology as Viya, including REST APIs and HTML5 interface. It will officially run on Viya once Viya is released. Like Viya, it does not require clients to purchase the full SAS stack and will be priced on volume rather than a simple subscription. In the case of CI 360, fees will be based on the number of “customer equivalent records” and marketing messages. A minimum installation might start around $10,000 per month, considerably less than the current CI 6 product and competitive with other mid-market digital marketing solutions. The initial CI 360 modules are available now.
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* The name is a little odd but it could have been SASaaS, so I guess we can be thankful for small mercies.
** Viya can run on the Amazon Web Services public cloud, SAS’s own cloud, or a company’s own private cloud.
Showing posts with label customer intelligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label customer intelligence. Show all posts
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Monday, December 01, 2014
Radius Provides High Quality Data on Small Businesses
When I first spoke with Radius just over one year ago, the company had already pivoted from its initial concept as a mobile app to connect consumers with local business events, to building a comprehensive list of small businesses and their attributes. Fast-forward twelve months and the company has again adjusted its offering, now presenting itself as a “marketing intelligence platform” that helps business marketers find prospects who are similar to their current buyers. This latest vision was appealing enough to attract $54.7 million in funding in September, bringing the announced total to over $80 million. So I’m guessing Radius will stick with this approach for a while.
What Radius does will sound broadly familiar to loyal readers of this blog: it scans social media, Web pages, government records, and other online sources to build a list of more than 20 million U.S. businesses and their attributes. It supplements these with conventional data sources to capture businesses with a limited digital profile. In its current incarnation, Radius also imports a list of won and lost deals from each client’s CRM system (direct connection to Salesforce.com, batch imports from others) and shows how well each attribute correlates with success.
Users can review the attribute list, create segments based on attributes, and analyze the attributes of each segment as a group. They can also flag existing segment members within the client’s current CRM database and import segment members who are not already in the client’s CRM (a.k.a. “net new prospects”). The imported records include basic company information and other attributes the client has preselected, but the system will not correct or enhance existing CRM records. Segment membership is adjusted automatically as Radius updates its data, which happens weekly. The system does not store fixed lists of segment members at a point in time, although users could achieve this by tagging records in CRM as they are imported.
And that’s pretty much it. No list of the most important attributes, no predictive modeling, one contact name per company, no alerts based on buying signals, no campaign analysis: just company information compared to your own customers, an way to build segments, and an option to purchase new prospects. The company plans to address some of these gaps but has not released the details.
Whatever its limits, Radius has attracted some big-name customers, most notably American Express, as well as all that funding. The primary reason seems to be data quality: the company says it can usually match 80% to 90% of the businesses in a well-maintained CRM system and that client tests have shown it is more accurate than competitors. This is both impressive and important, especially where small businesses are concerned. Available data includes basics (address, phone, industry, company size, revenue, contact name), Web activity (presence of a Web site, Facebook and Twitter accounts, use of daily deals and check ins, and average review ratings), and technologies used.
The system has some other advantages. New clients are deployed in 24 hours, including the time to import CRM data and calculate success rates by attribute. The user interface is attractive and intuitive. Pricing starts at $15,000 per year for small enterprises. It is based on the number of company records in the client database, so it doesn’t increase based on how heavily the system is used. It also includes use of the system software and credits for some number of new prospects imported from the Radius database.
In short, Radius strikes me as a solid solution for what it does, which is provide targeted company-level prospect lists and profiles of your current customer base. If that’s what you want, take a closer look. If you want to know more about trigger events or individual contacts or want lead scoring or other types of predictive modeling, you’ll probably be happier with something else.
What Radius does will sound broadly familiar to loyal readers of this blog: it scans social media, Web pages, government records, and other online sources to build a list of more than 20 million U.S. businesses and their attributes. It supplements these with conventional data sources to capture businesses with a limited digital profile. In its current incarnation, Radius also imports a list of won and lost deals from each client’s CRM system (direct connection to Salesforce.com, batch imports from others) and shows how well each attribute correlates with success.
Users can review the attribute list, create segments based on attributes, and analyze the attributes of each segment as a group. They can also flag existing segment members within the client’s current CRM database and import segment members who are not already in the client’s CRM (a.k.a. “net new prospects”). The imported records include basic company information and other attributes the client has preselected, but the system will not correct or enhance existing CRM records. Segment membership is adjusted automatically as Radius updates its data, which happens weekly. The system does not store fixed lists of segment members at a point in time, although users could achieve this by tagging records in CRM as they are imported.
And that’s pretty much it. No list of the most important attributes, no predictive modeling, one contact name per company, no alerts based on buying signals, no campaign analysis: just company information compared to your own customers, an way to build segments, and an option to purchase new prospects. The company plans to address some of these gaps but has not released the details.
Whatever its limits, Radius has attracted some big-name customers, most notably American Express, as well as all that funding. The primary reason seems to be data quality: the company says it can usually match 80% to 90% of the businesses in a well-maintained CRM system and that client tests have shown it is more accurate than competitors. This is both impressive and important, especially where small businesses are concerned. Available data includes basics (address, phone, industry, company size, revenue, contact name), Web activity (presence of a Web site, Facebook and Twitter accounts, use of daily deals and check ins, and average review ratings), and technologies used.
The system has some other advantages. New clients are deployed in 24 hours, including the time to import CRM data and calculate success rates by attribute. The user interface is attractive and intuitive. Pricing starts at $15,000 per year for small enterprises. It is based on the number of company records in the client database, so it doesn’t increase based on how heavily the system is used. It also includes use of the system software and credits for some number of new prospects imported from the Radius database.
In short, Radius strikes me as a solid solution for what it does, which is provide targeted company-level prospect lists and profiles of your current customer base. If that’s what you want, take a closer look. If you want to know more about trigger events or individual contacts or want lead scoring or other types of predictive modeling, you’ll probably be happier with something else.
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