The Challenge of Finding What's Right for Business Date:   Wednesday , October 02, 2013 Headquartered in Bangalore, Credii is a cloud-based platform provider for business software selection & procurement. The company raised $50,000 from 500 Startups. Investing in technology has never been cheaper or faster than it is now, thanks to the advent of cloud computing and emergence of SaaS as the preferred model for software delivery. In stark contrast to how things were just a decade ago, businesses are now spoilt for choice and most tools have become affordable even to the smallest of companies. The one thing that has not become any easier though, is figuring out what software or services work best for them. The Vanishing Act Large enterprises have traditionally relied on analyst firms such as Gartner and Forrester to stay on top of emerging technologies. With new startups launching at breakneck speed, these firms are finding it difficult to keep pace with the fast-changing landscape as their model of publishing long-form reports once a year is woefully ill-equipped for this new market reality. Smaller businesses, on the other hand, relied on a different ecosystem for guidance and advice. They bought a majority of software and services from resellers who also provided recommendations on what solutions were a good fit for the business. Although there was a risk of bias in these recommendations, it made sense for small businesses as resellers helped with solution deployment and were around to support further needs. But as software delivery rapidly moves away from the on-premise model to the cloud, this ecosystem is all but vanished. Clutter is the New Norm As the number of software and service options in the market shot up, information clutter surrounding these solutions has inundated the web. Aggressive content marketing and use of social media to propagate this has ensured that search engines can no longer offer meaningful help in discovering the right solutions in a web full of promotional and marketing spin. The Invisible Lock-in De facto oligopolies that were common in many software markets are now a thing of past (think SAP, Oracle and Microsoft for CRM). As these do-it-all platforms give way to a clutch of smaller and more focused SaaS solutions, a new selection risk is emerging. The current SaaS ecosystem lacks inter-operability standards and data portability is a huge concern. Even if it has become easy for businesses to experiment with new vendors and services without significant financial commitment, lack of data portability means that there is an invisible lock-in risk for most businesses as moving from an under-performing product ends up costing them valuable time. Compounding the risk of picking a wrong piece of software are issues such as data control and auditability as they are difficult to manage in off-premise environments. There is Hope! For most companies, the real cost of IT is not just what they pay to use it. It is also about how much time they spend on configuring the tools, training the employees and onboarding business processes. A bad selection can easily spike these follow on costs and end up causing more damage than just a few months’ subscription. The current approach to making technology selection decisions using analysts, resellers or DIY research on the internet is completely broken. Business owners, CIOs and managers are forced to spend an unreasonable amount of time away from their core job and do all the heavy lifting of discovering and evaluating a ton of options available in the market. The tools they have at their disposal are substandard too – outdated analyst reports, vendor demos, webinars and blogs. Even after this exercise, many businesses end up with solutions that don't meet their needs well. But there is good news! A few interesting platforms are emerging to help businesses make smarter decisions around technology. Some of them rely on crowdsourcing to aggregate relevant practitioner insights about various products, and some use a blended approach of curated content and crowdsourcing. Most are within the reach of small businesses (unlike Gartner and Forrester) and all of them are built for the post-SaaS world. For businesses, buying the right software or services may not be such a nightmare anymore.