I was very pleased by the extremely bullish outlook on cloud computing voiced at SaaSCon, especially by representatives from some of the larger companies. More than one speaker indicated that the market has reached a tipping point, where the maturity of services and software offered, combined with the current economic climate, are making the cloud much more attractive to large companies. Some, like Bob Sala, CEO of Distribution Marketing Advantage, stressed that moving to the cloud is now a strategic imperative.

Sala delivered a compelling presentation about his company’s SaaS journey. DMA is a $3 billion, privately-held company with 85 warehouses that is an alliance of North American regionally-owned and operated food service distributors. DMA members serve multi-unit restaurant and institutional operators in the United States and Canada. Chain operators like P.F. Chang’s, Hyatt, The Melting Pot and about a dozen others are served by DMA’s food distributors. [Full disclosure: DMA is a PivotLink customer and partner]

“We distribute food products to chain restaurants in the 50-250 store space,” Sala said. “The chains require standard distribution services, standard pricing, centralized reporting and a central point of contact. DMA exists because we are able to replicate a national distributor with 12 of the best regional distributors in the business, a portfolio of national accounts management tools, and talented people.”

Sala stressed that DMA is a supply chain logistics company, not a technology company.

DMA's SaaS ecosystem is Cloud-to-Cloud and uses PivotLink for real-time business insight.

That said, DMA began operating its business in the cloud when it implemented its order entry system in 2001, long before SaaS was even known as SaaS. Since then DMA has implemented all its systems in the cloud, including data warehousing, custom hosted applications, business analytics, CRM, expense reporting and network services. Their ecosystem of more than 13 integrated SaaS applications contrasts the BI integration woes in Doug Henschen’s article in Information Week that cites findings from Howard Dresner’s Wisdom of the Crowds study.

“We have been able to out-maneuver our larger, less nimble competitors using SaaS technology,” Sala said. “Moving to SaaS has become more of a strategic decision and less a capital decision for DMA.”

With pre-tax margins of 2 percent, DMA does not have much room for error. “SaaS gets us up and running faster than our competitors,” Sala said. “With PivotLink, a Chili’s store manager can see the results of particular shrimp promotion in 13,000 restaurants, by store, by units, over-time, and get it in a graphical report.”

With nearly a decade’s experience working with SaaS, Sala offered his philosophy on how to choose the right SaaS vendors and partners.

7 Guiding Principles for Selecting
Integration Friendly Application Partners

1. Commitment to products, services innovation aligned with our technology vision: Fit is first and foremost, according to Sala.
2. Commitment to protect data confidentiality and respect for data ownership: Confidentiality is extremely important, because it provides DMA, and other businesses, with competitive advantage. Sala does not want his vendors to use or re-purpose any of DMA’s data.
3. Provides cost effective, scalable solutions: DMA intends to keep growing, and its technology infrastructure needs to scale.
4. Financially viable and have experience hosting: Sala asks to see every vendor’s financials if they are a private company, and isn’t inclined to work with inexperienced SaaS vendors.
5. Provides high service levels (up-time) backed by service-level agreements: Systems downtime kills profits and service-level agreements assure that outages will be kept to a minimum.
6. Flexibility approach to customized/ professional services with exclusivity: DMA insists on exclusivity agreements on custom solutions built by systems integrators because they don’t want the solution to be re-packaged and sold to its competitors.
7. SaaS 70 Type II Certification: Only the highest security certification will do for DMA’s solutions.

Have a question about DMA’s approach? Let us know. We’d like to hear your take.

Read about DMA in Robert Mitchell’s Computerworld article “SaaS Takes on Business Intelligence” or learn more in the case study or DMA’s website.

Retail automation systems combined with data from the web are yielding more information than ever. On Thursday, January 21, 2010 PivotLink and the North Face will present a session entitled Retail Analytics – How to Get the Numbers That Matter. Sarah Jones, Retail Floor Space Management Manager at the North Face, will discuss how she uses PivotLink’s On-demand Retail Analytics and Reporting solution to turn mountains of data about customers, merchandise and operations into knowledge that provides blue sky visibility into what sells, to whom, why and empowers the North Face to stay ahead of the pack.

Increasingly, top outdoor retailers (and PivotLink customers) like the North Face, REI, Rossignol, Smartwool, CamelBak, Bauer, Timbuk2, Brooks, Fleet Feet, Thule and VF Corp. are bypassing erstwhile ERP systems and tapping into their business via on-demand BA. They understand that it’s essential to analyze the data they collect in near real-time, make business intelligence accessible to more users and enable everyone throughout the retail supply chain to make effective decisions. Doug Henschen’s recent article in Intelligent Enterprise highlights how PivotLink’s SaaS-based BI solution enables ski and snowboard equipment maker Rossignol to track sales and maneuver through the winter retail season.  Jim Hunter, V.P Operations & CFO Rossignol North America points out that they chose PivotLink over an “aging home-grown ERP system” to keep a firm grip on the numbers.

Stay on top of the latest trends in outdoor retail and see PivotLink live from the show floor this week at the outdoor retail industry event of the season.

• Our CMO Dyke Hensen will be speaking on, “Using Lead Nurturing and Scoring to Deliver More and Higher-Quality Sales Leads”, Wed Nov 18 at 3:30 PM.
• Drop by booth #1012 for a demo and talk Sales Analytics, KPIs, On-demand BA, Data Integration.
• Join us for a drink at the Marketing Cloud Party on Thursday night at the St. Regis  from 6-8 PM

We’ll also be making a big announcement at the conference, so stay tuned for the scoop !