Last week I spoke at a web conference hosted by M.R. Rangaswami, publisher of SandHill.com, entitled “The Death of the Enterprise Software Buying Cycle.” The premise was that the SaaS business model is driving changes to the sales model and changing the role of the CIO in the buying cycle. For a replay of the discussion click here.

My input to the panel was focused on how the advent of SaaS solutions has changed the role of the CIO and what criteria we apply when evaluating SaaS vendors. In fact, many of these same points apply to the sales cycles for open source software vendors: (more…)