Who is the Customer?

HarrisData listens, and offers multi-year pre-paid licenses where our customers require one. The customer preference wins over our management preference.

Who is the Customer?

Dave Kellogg doesn’t care for multi-year pre-paid deals in the cloud. The nub is it makes things difficult for analysts and potential venture capitalist funders and buyers of cloud software firms. As he sums things up:

"Why do I Recommend Avoiding Multi-Year Prepaid Deals? In a phrase, it’s because they’re not the norm. If you want to raise money from (and eventually sell to) people who are used to SaaS businesses that look a certain way — unless you are specifically trying to disrupt the business model — then you should generally do things that certain way. Multi-year prepaid deals complicate numerous things and each of those complications will be seen not as endemic to the space, but as idiosyncratic to your company."

If you want to raise money from (and eventually sell to) people who are used to SaaS businesses that look a certain way — unless you are specifically trying to disrupt the business model — then you should generally do things that certain way.

This is great advice provided the customer that matters is buying your business, while the businesses that subscribe to your cloud offering are mere rows in venture capital’s pro forma spreadsheets.

At HarrisData, we focus on the businesses that subscribe to and use our products as our customers. One-year terms provide consistent cash flow. One-year terms allow annual price increases. One-year terms keep us focused on satisfying our customers every day to earn the subscription renewal. They make things easy for our management. We prefer annual subscriptions.

Some customers may have other goals. They desire price stability over a longer term. They intend to implement on-premises* (we offer our “cloud” software on-premises on customer request) and desire a lease including hardware and subscription costs for a period longer than one year.

HarrisData listens and offers multi-year pre-paid licenses where our customers require one. The customer preference wins over our management preference.

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