Virtual Entrepreneur

Powerful Enterprise Software Small Biz Can Afford

May 26th, 2008 | Author: MrsMoney

Forbes:
Less risk, more reward? Regardless of how you do the math, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are providing smaller businesses with software capabilities that previously only larger companies could afford.

For example, when Steven Vine, deputy general counsel for Register.com, joined the company about a year and a half ago, the new CEO was pushing Register.com, which now has about 500 employees, from being just a domain name registrar to become a provider of online business services.

Vine, however, identified one pressing challenge: ‘We didn’t have a clear idea of which contracts we have,’ he says. All business contracts were signed, scanned and then saved to hard drives, so whenever a contract-related question arose, the legal department had to find and read through the entire contact to locate the relevant provision.

This was a time-consuming process, especially since contracts average about 20 pages in length, some reaching 100. Furthermore, it meant that crucial information – such as customers’ contract expiration dates and Register’s own service-level agreements with suppliers – remained in the legal department silo, making it difficult for those in other departments to see them.

Many law firms address such problems by using contract-management software.