It’s no secret that businesses and technology changes. Not that long ago it was the norm to be contacted by phone or handwritten letters. Now the majority of customer communication happens through email. It looks like the world of software is no different.
Before Cloud and SaaS (Software as a Service), the norm was on-premise software. You purchased licenses for software, bought an upgrade when a new version was released, and handled all of the responsibility of hosting the data on-premise yourself.
When Cloud/SaaS solutions were first introduced, some businesses were relieved that they didn’t have to setup and host their data on-premise. Others were hesitant – they didn’t trust the cloud, didn’t understand what it was, or were unsure about the state of cloud security.
While some buyers still prefer to host their own data on-premise, it’s evident that cloud is now becoming the norm, with only a tiny percentage of buyers looking for on-premise solutions.
According to Market Research Analyst, Craig Borowski of Software Advice, the demand for on-premise Project Management software is down to under 1%.
When asking Borowski about the demand for Cloud CRMs, he explained that it too has increased tremendously.
“In 2010, about 15 percent of total requests were for on-premise software. That portion has been steadily dwindling down, in 2016 it was down to under one percent.”
– Craig Borowski, Market Research Analyst at Software Advice
We’ve seen this trend in our own customers as well. When we launched Daylite Cloud over a year ago, we anticipated that a relatively large chunk of new customers would still choose to host their own data. After all, it’s essentially the same app, it’s just a question of whether you want to host your data yourself or not. And being in a niche market – selling to only Mac small businesses that want a real Mac app instead of a web app – we thought there would still be a pretty big demand for on-premise.
We also figured that since our existing Daylite customers have already setup and were managing their own server, that there wouldn’t be a lot of customers interested in moving their data to the cloud.
It turns out we were very wrong about that…
After launching Daylite Cloud, the vast majority of new customers are choosing Daylite Cloud over Daylite Self-Serve. We were also shocked by the demand of existing Self-Serve customers that wanted to move to Daylite Cloud.
Within the first month of launching Daylite Cloud, we received well over 100 requests from customers wanting to move their databases to the cloud. Within the first 3 months, we had migrated over 700 databases.
When asking our customers why they were so eager to move to Daylite Cloud, we kept hearing these 4 common things:
Peace of Mind
Many of our customers are small businesses around 1-15 employees. With a small team, we’ve found that being the IT person is just another hat that these business owners or managers have to wear. With Daylite Cloud, they no longer need to be the IT person, and they don’t have to worry about backups, networking, or anything to do with a server. This also eliminates their risk of losing data because of something like a hard drive failure, corrupt backups, or a natural disaster. The same thing we keep hearing from customers that have moved to cloud is “It just works!”
Better Syncing
A lot of our customers use Daylite for remote syncing so they can keep working on their iPhones and iPads when they’re not in the office. But one of the common frustrations with Daylite Self-Serve is that remote syncing requires networking knowledge – knowledge that most small business owners don’t have. Because of this, many customers experienced a lot of problems with syncing. So when the option to move to Daylite Cloud and be rid of these issues was on the table, they jumped to grab it.
More Functionality
We’ve also heard from customers that a compelling reason to move to Daylite Cloud has been additional functionality such as Zapier integration, the Daylite Cloud API, as well as email integration coming to the iPhone and iPad. Customers have expressed how excited they are to leverage Zapier integration so they can pull leads from online web forms or Facebook Lead Ads right into Daylite. And with the Daylite Cloud API, all sorts of custom workflow automations are possible.
Affordability
We’ve heard from many customers that while the initial cost to move to Daylite Cloud costs more than purchasing licenses, it’s well worth it because of the time saved in managing the server, doing backups, security, etc. For a lot of small businesses, this also saves them having to pay for an IT person to troubleshoot when there are server issues, do updates to the server, or host it if they’re paying an IT person to host the database entirely. In the long run, Daylite Cloud saves them time, money, and helps keeps their sanity.
Want to ditch your server and move to Daylite Cloud? Contact our team to learn more.
