Customizable SaaS: An oxymoron or the next generation of SaaS?

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Today I read a great article by Galen Gruman at CIO.com titled The Truth About Software as a Service (SaaS).  Galen states that SaaS is a good option but not suited for situations when you need customization.  He quotes Lloyd Hohenstein of Schwab Technology: “Don’t expect something unique. If you need everything customized, you
won’t have success with SaaS.”

If you’re a QuickBase user you know that isn’t true.  I’d be hard pressed to find two identical QuickBase’s in the hundreds of thousands of applications deployed by our customers.  The article also states that "The underlying data model and system architecture of SaaS is also not customizable."  With QuickBase this is true only for the core of our system.  All of the individual QuickBase applications have completely independent data structures.

The conventional wisdom states that if you want a solution that fits your business needs you must build it yourself or do a complex customization of an on-premise solution.  Galen does a great job of describing the majority of the market.  For SaaS to continue to thrive and grow in the world’s largest companies it must enable users to make the software work for them.  Packaged solutions force you to work the way they work and it’s never exactly right for the way your business works.  Intuit and QuickBase are way ahead because QuickBase is made to be molded to your process. 

With QuickBase you get the benefits of SaaS – anytime, anywhere access, no systems to maintain and upgrade, great collaboration inside and outside of your firewall… and the ability to make it mold to your process.  The best of both worlds.

So, a question to you: what do you use QuickBase for?  What’s unique about the way you use it?

Bill Lucchini

GM of Intuit Partner Platform and QuickBase, father of 3 boys, windsurfer. Follow Bill @WAPL.

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  • Carl Nye

    I have deployed Quickbase in my operations unit to improve processes that were mostly manual and untrackable. We have been able to quickly develop and customize over 50 applications that control and measure many different processes within my group. This flexibility has allowed me to add well over 1mm to our bottom line in just a years time. We would not have been able to make this progress without Quickbase. We looked at multiple solutions in the beginning and none of them provided us with the flexibility and pure speed to take the application from idea to implementation as Quickbase does.

    I am a big fan of Quickbase and think any business could greatly improve their operationally efficiency by allowing their teams to use Quickbase to solve their needs.

    P.S. Basic programming skills are all that we needed to make this happen for us.

    [Reply]

  • Carl Nye

    I have deployed Quickbase in my operations unit to improve processes that were mostly manual and untrackable. We have been able to quickly develop and customize over 50 applications that control and measure many different processes within my group. This flexibility has allowed me to add well over 1mm to our bottom line in just a years time. We would not have been able to make this progress without Quickbase. We looked at multiple solutions in the beginning and none of them provided us with the flexibility and pure speed to take the application from idea to implementation as Quickbase does.

    I am a big fan of Quickbase and think any business could greatly improve their operationally efficiency by allowing their teams to use Quickbase to solve their needs.

    P.S. Basic programming skills are all that we needed to make this happen for us.

    [Reply]

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