“With SaaS, clients don’t need a big firm like Accenture anymore. They don’t need someone who is going to show up with a large team of people for months at a time, if not years,” says Eric Berridge, Bluewolf principal and co-founder. Rather, SaaS projects are more like business process consulting engagements that require a few specialists who bring expertise around the specific SaaS application and really know how to configure it.

Bluewolf specializes in Saleforce.com and has done over 600 SaaS implementations in the past five years. “Customers call us up and say, ‘We just licensed this. How should we configure this? Can you train our people? How do we integrate it with our ERP system or database?’” says Berridge. A typical Bluewolf engagement takes 30 to 90 days and involves just a few people.

SaaS: The Client View Fifteen minutes after Ginsburg Development Com-panies LLC, Valhalla, NY, signed up for Salesforce.com, they had access to the application. Now what? “We felt that we needed a consultant because we had never deployed CRM before. We wanted Salesforce.com experience, training, and adoption help,” says Brian Boyd, CIO. On a recommendation from Salesforce.com, Boyd contacted Bluewolf and was impressed with Bluewolf’s training expertise. “A consulting firm like Accenture would have been too large for us,” he adds. Ginsburg Development has 300 employees and develops residential communities in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. The entire implementation process under Bluewolf direction took about three months. It entailed requirements gathering, configuring the application, developing training materials, and, finally, training the staff.  “Only on the last day of training did we flip the switch to turn on Sales-force.com, and almost everybody started using it on Day One, ”says Boyd. The cost of the entire Bluewolf effort came to one-third of that of the Salesforce.com initiative. Boyd expects that he will bring in the consultants for a refresher course at some point and again when the company reconfigures the software to support a different sales process for a new division.

For example, Bluewolf has been working with a large Fortune 1000 company for the past year in implementing Salesforce.com department by department. Each month, they show up for a couple of days to bring on the next department. They roll out the client’s standard configuration and train the department’s personnel.

To build a SaaS practice under these conditions, the consulting firm needs to be nimble. “Our model is based on shuttling our people among clients,” says Berridge. Bluewolf teams, in effect, parachute in as needed and leave just as quickly. Clients end up paying time and materials based on an hourly rate, but “it appears like fixed price in sheep’s clothing. We give them a budget price at the outset but we have stringent language around changes and change management,” he explains.

Berridge does not pay much attention to what the large consulting firms such as Accenture and Deloitte may do in terms of SaaS practices. “The problem for them is the business model,” he says. Specifically, most SaaS clients are unlikely to spend the kind of money that it takes to bring in a large, top-tier consulting firm like Accenture or Deloitte.