A few weeks ago, my family and I took our first long vacation in several years. We visited family in Ellijay, Georgia, and we spent some time on beautiful Topsail Island, NC. It’s obviously been a long time since we’ve had a vacation, so my ability to step away from work was a little rusty. In fact, when I found out that our beach house had wireless, I was so excited I did the Linus Dance. I was able to get to all my applications (of course, being that we’re a SaaS software company, all of my apps are SaaS-based), and I was able to fight some fires while I was out.
But then… disaster struck! As I was showing my father-in-law something on the internet, I was startled by something, turned too quickly, and knocked a glass of wine onto my keyboard. You can guess what happened next… a sizzle, a quick whiff of ozone, and then the screen went black. Uh-oh.
So, I was without a laptop. Luckily, I still had my iPhone, and I still had access to all of my applications, since they were all on the web, and not installed on my hard drive. Even though I had a catastrophic equipment failure, I did not have a catastrophic loss of productivity.
As soon as I returned home and brought my sad, fried laptop to Best Buy for repair, I was able to get up and running on our iMac. And when we realized that it would be THREE WEEKS before my laptop would be repaired, I was able to buy a MacBook, get it set up to use my SaaS software, and be up and running in less than 30 minutes! I was already hooked on SaaS, but after this experience, my support was cemented. If I had to re-install all my applications on my hard drive, we’d be talking about hours (at least!) of lost productivity and hair-pulling.
All of my data were still there. The documents I have created over the past few months were still available on nGenera’s own SaaS-based collaboration tool, nGen Collaboration. All of my resumes, schedules, and interview comments were still waiting for me on Jobvite. In short, I was able to access all my information, on demand, when I needed it.
And SaaS applications made that possible.