Sonian's Cloud Buzz Blog

</cloud swagger on/>

This is a true story.

This is not a "Tortoise versus the Hare" parable. In that classic life lesson, the tortoise's "slow and steady" wins the race. In our retelling, the cloud, as the hare, wins the race. Not because it's "slow and steady" but rather quicker and more nimble. Enterprise companies want quick, nimble and less expensive.

So here’s the story as re-told to me (and verified for accuracy):

An email archiving prospect contacts our sales group seeking a quote for our cloud-powered SaaS email archiving service.

A sales engineer helps the prospect over the phone to assist the initial configuration for a free-trial proof of concept. Within 23 minutes the customer is searching, viewing and exporting their archived email.

But this true story gets even better. The [amazed] prospect contacts another email archiving vendor, a vendor that only sells installed software, and asks their sales engineer how long it would take to get a free-trial proof of concept up and running. Images of a stopwatch ticking down as a watermark to the conversation. The answer is a few weeks. Not 23 minutes, not even 23 hours, and maybe if the on-premise’s email archive vendor is lucky, less than 23 days.

The things is, the cloud-powered SaaS implementation has nearly the same feature set, costs 66% less than on-premises, and is the embodiment of simple sophistication.

Ohh.... and one more thing. There is a happy ending. The prospect is now a Sonian customer.

Just saying...

</cloud swagger off/>