Salesforce should pay for your data

Salesforce.com and many other software as a service providers keep information about your data. And they plan to use it for personal gain. It's in the contract your company signed with them. Now it's time to reverse the situation and get them to pay you.

Some investors believe that the holy grail of SaaS will appear when the online vendors are able to gather enough anonymous data in aggregate about how their customers and their customers' customers are using services in the cloud that they will be able to make accurate predictions in a variety of areas.

Imagine, say, a major CRM SaaS provider who has thousands of customers who are getting terabytes of information about millions of their customers in a variety of markets over time. If the SaaS vendor could collect the data, segment it by vertical market, then plot buying trends based on product categories, wouldn't businesses--even your competitors--in those vertical markets be willing to pay premium prices for that trend data. You bet they would.

The problem I have with that scenario is not the gathering of the data or the selling of it, but that the SaaS vendor didn't pay the source for the data. In fact, it got paid by the source (its customers). And in most cases, the source doesn't even know it's happening. After all, so many SaaS contracts are signed by business-unit managers, who aren't bothering with the fine print of the contract. Seems both sneaky and cheeky to me.

It's time for IT managers to step in and offer another piece of advice to business units properly keen on getting up and running quickly on a SaaS app. Get the SaaS provider to pay for the data they gather and keep about your SaaS users and your customers. I suggest starting at $1 per megabyte per month, but it can be negotiated.

And if your SaaS provider balks at changing the contract? Suggest you'll move on to the competition. Unlike the packaged application market where practical monopolies exist in virtually every market segment, the SaaS market is like the Wild West with plenty of competitors to choose from. Don't get bullied. Get paid.