Why are you still paying the SaaS tax?

Nobody likes paying taxes. We don’t always know what we’re paying, and we don’t always know why we’re paying them. But we pay them.?

What if I told you there’s another tax you’re paying – an unnecessary one – that’s part of your everyday work life??

In the last 15 years or so, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and all its variants – PaaS, IaaS, DaaS (and so on) – have exploded. Every organization on the planet uses SaaS in some form or fashion. As a matter of fact, according to the good folks at NetSkope, the average enterprise uses nearly 1,300 cloud services. The marketing department ranks at the top of the list with 120 cloud services. Another kicker: most of those cloud services aren’t enterprise-ready, but that’s a topic for another day. For now, let’s stay focused on cloud service usage.?

Brands pay a SaaS “tax” every time they copy and move data to any of these cloud services. I call it SaaS Taxation by Duplication. Catchy, huh? Feel free to steal it. ??

It’s a situation that can easily spiral out of control. Your brand likely stores browsing history, purchase history, clicks, opens, events, etc., for a long, long time. Each of your marketing technology vendors has its own digital exhaust trail that can be stored for a long, long time.?

While data-mature brands will move this data to their central source of truth (aka their warehouse) ASAP ... everyone else is stuck with the SaaS tax. Because each cloud service vendor has specific features and capabilities for data management, retention, and so on and it’s easy to overlook or ignore those incremental charges, the price to use these services keeps climbing – often without anyone noticing.?

For enterprises handling millions of data records daily, that’s a ton of money – SaaS Taxation by Duplication.

To be sure, other “taxes” are associated with duplicating data to so many cloud services. For example, there is an opportunity cost “tax” or latency “tax.” In other words, every time you copy vast amounts of data to different platforms and services, your data is no longer in real-time. It’s stale and out of date. Customer engagement is measured in seconds and minutes, not hours and days. Peak ROI is…well…not at its peak when data is already seconds and minutes (and hours and days) old.?

Finally, there is a tradeoff “tax” forced upon marketers. Copying of data often requires a technical resource to ensure integrity. Well, said technical resources may be involved in other high-value projects and can’t provide the necessary support to marketing for a day, a week, or a month. In the meantime, marketers make do with what they have – incomplete, aged data (unlike wine and cheese, data does not age well) that hampers any campaign right from the start.

While many brands just chalk the SaaS tax up to the cost of doing business, there is another way. When you connect directly to your data, right where it lives, these extra costs are eliminated. Not to mention all the delays, inaccuracies, and complicated workarounds.?

So…we say No SaaS Taxation by Duplication. It’s not necessary, it’s expensive, it’s prohibitive, and it’s just plain silly.?

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