You've got the power

I'm pleased to report that Intacct recently passed the milestone of 50 positive reviews on the Salesforce.com Appexchange - 56 in all as of this writing. By my count, this makes Intacct #6 out of more than 800 applications reviewed on the Appexchange as measured by the number of positive reviews.

Where I am particularly proud of this milestone is that the reviews are nearly all from CFOs, finance VPs and controllers - not the usual audience of sales and marketing executives that make up the majority of the Salesforce community.

I'm very thankful for the 56 people who've spent the time to write-up their reviews of Intacct - if you read them you'll see that they are passionate about the product and really receiving great value.

The broader topic that this gets me thinking about is how the Internet changes the process of evaluating and selecting technology. I'm involved nearly constantly with people who are buying cloud computing applications - and I would say that the majority of them aren't yet taking full advantage of all the new tools they have to help them make sure that they are making the right decision, particularly the new community and social networking resources that are now available.

In the old days (say pre-1995) nearly all of your information about buying technology products came from your sales person - whether it was product or technical information or contacts at reference customers using the products - the only easy way to get it was from the salesperson at the vendor itself. Since information is power, it was the salesperson who really held the power in the process.

Today - certainly post 2005 - the technology evaluation process is just so much different - the power of information is shifted to you - the buyer - since you can find out just about anything with a few clicks of your mouse.

It's now easy to search the web for both positive and negative information about products you are thinking about adopting - my admittedly biased favorite examples in the ERP market being the infamous Web search for "NetSuite Nightmare" which currently returns about 64,000 results and for "SAP Failure" which returns 5.9 million hits.

Similarly, business oriented social networking sites like LinkedIn and Twitter and the afforementioned Appexchange offer a wealth of information if you are looking at acquiring a new technology - you can both search to see what people are talking about and also post questions to experts from these communities who are currently using the products that you are thinking of adopting.

You can also discover lots of information that was difficult to find in the old days that can really help you in your selection and contracting process - what pricing, discounts and license terms are people getting lately? How do current customers like the support they are receiving? How is the vendor doing against their SLA? What is the subscription renewal process like? How have they found the company culture to work with? Would they buy again? People seem to be happy to answer questions like these on the social networks.

Combine this dramatic change in your ability to get information about technology products with the possibility for you to test drive most cloud computing applications before you make a purchase and you can see why I think that the Internet and cloud computing have together dramatically shifted the power from the seller to the buyer. And that's a good thing - more informed buyers make better purchasing decisions which are better for both the buyer and the seller.