According to Nick Carr of "IT doesn't matter" infamy, McKinsey is set to release a study suggesting widespread and robust adoption of SaaS, even at Global 2000 companies.

"Large companies appear to be jumping en masse onto the software-as-a-service bandwagon, according to a new survey of CIOs by management consultants McKinsey & Company. The survey found that 61% of North American companies with sales over $1 billion plan to adopt one or more SaaS applications over the next year, a dramatic increase from the 38% who were planning to install SaaS apps in 2005."

The most popular SaaS business applications, according to the McKinsey study, are for human-resource management, billing and order entry, and sales management.

What are the top 10 reasons for you to adopt SaaS?

#6 Re-claiming constrained IT resources – SaaS solutions by their nature require considerably less reliance on your IT staff which helps reduce expense, speed up project progress and free up resources for other strategic IT initiatives.

#7 Remote access by default – SaaS solutions are designed for external use and provide secure world-wide remote access at no extra cost. By contrast, on-premise systems typically run on the desktop and require additional software to become web-based and security certificates to provide secure access. As a result, on-premise solutions cost more to acquire and maintain, and take longer to deploy.

#8 Reduced risks – Backing out of a SaaS service is easier and less costly than dumping an unsuccessful on-premise implementation. The unfortunate statistics show that at least 50% of on-premise CRM installations fail, leaving companies with no derived value for their software investment. Their only option is to shelve the software they have already paid for in full.

#9 Single point of performance accountability – SaaS solutions eliminate the accountability gap typical for on-premise solutions with software and hardware components supported by different parties (at a minimum a customer and a vendor). They ensure an unambiguous, single point of accountability for performance.

#10 Alignment of vendor & client interest – To stay in business, your SaaS vendor will need to prove their commitment to you day in and day out. Being satisfied is no longer sufficient, they want you delighted with the quality of service and the value you are receiving over time.

As the leading on-demand sales compensation management solution, Compel® fully leverages the SaaS model. To learn more about Compel and the benefits of SaaS, follow the links below. The SaaS Total Cost of Ownership white paper was prepared by the SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association) Software-as-a-Service Executive Council

Compel® Document Management and Plan Approval ensures a consistent, efficient and auditable process for distributing and tracking compensation plans and other related documents. Customers are able to create, publish, view, approve and track plan documents and other key documents, such as SPIF eligibility rules, from within the Compel solution. Compel makes document management easy by leveraging a document creation and distribution wizard along with status and alert information for plan recipients and compensation analysts.

• Creating & Publishing Documents: Compensation analysts can easily create a document profile and attach a document in any file format, including MS Word, MS Excel, Adobe PDF, etc. This capability enables administrators to distribute and track not only annual plan documents, but also a variety of related sales communication documents throughout the year.
• Viewing Documents: Sales representatives and executives have an at-a-glance view of their documents directly in the Documents section of their dashboard and can view them at any time. Compel notifies payees every time a new document is published on their dashboard through an alert message pop-up when they first log in. Documents requiring approval are flagged with an icon indicating that an action is required and appear first on the list.
• Approving Documents: Sales representatives and executives can approve documents directly from the Documents section of their dashboards. Clicking on any document name brings the participant to the Document Details pop-up, which indicates the created and published dates and allows them to approve any documents that were flagged for approval by the compensation analyst. The approval checkbox becomes available only after the user has viewed the document, safeguarding against unwarranted approvals.

Enabling SOX Compliance

• Prevent approval reversal and deletion of approved documents
• Ensure users cannot make changes to documents published to them -
   before or after they accept the contents
• Record & report ìapprovedî status, payee name and date
• Maintain an ongoing historical record of all approvals
• Prevent published documents from being deleted
• Archive expired, obsolete or infrequently used documents
• Delete only unpublished document profiles

To learn more about Compelís flexible Document Management capabilities and how they enable SOX compliance and the efficiency and accuracy of compensation plan management, follow the link below.

In December 2006 Centive announced MoreMentum™, a program designed to help companies gain sales momentum by getting more out of their sales incentive programs. Under the MoreMentum program, Centive will provide new customers of their award-winning on-demand sales compensation management system, Compel®, with free personalized American Express Incentive Services (AEIS) cards for use with SPIF (special promotion incentive fund) programs.

With the MoreMentum program, customers will deploy Compel to automate their sales commission process and provide sales representatives and managers with real-time visibility into earnings and sales performance metrics. In addition, they can implement any number of SPIF programs that pay out either cash rewards or automatically fund AEIS’ prepaid cards. Centive will deliver branded, personalized cards to new customers that can be used to direct reward winners towards specific spending options to ensure the reward is memorable. The MoreMentum program is available to new customers through the end of February 2007.

Centive also announced our own ‘More-Mentum’ - a series of real world measurements that validate Centive’s leadership position in the sales compensation market. Just in the month of November, leading companies like McData, UTStarcom, Flowserve, SPX and DBUP completed deployment of Compel. In addition, in Q4 alone 17 companies representing more than 3,000 subscribers – including companies like IKON, ADIC, Knology, Cars.com and Wolters Kluwer – have selected Compel to automate their sales commission process.

To learn why more CFOs and VPs of Sales have deployed Compel than any other on-demand sales compensation system, follow the links below.