SaaS Adoption: U.S. vs Asia

U.S. vs Asia

Obviously, the U.S. is the furthest ahead when it comes to SaaS adoption when it comes to companies really enabling technology to help their companies.  In Asia, now we are starting to see that push to be able to:

A) use products

B) be actually able to build products

One of the challenges of actually building a SaaS product is that it is not something that takes 3 months.  You can’t just go out and put an app together when you are in the app store.  It is something that takes a year, two, or sometimes 4 years to be able to build a product that a business is able to use and reliably run their business on.  That is one of the biggest challenges of building a company in a SaaS space.  It takes time to get it to market.  People have to have patience and people also have to have the money.  So for any company it is crucial to understand the customer and the time that it takes to build the product.

Adopting SaaS in South Korea

As we have seen in Korea, Taiwan, and even Singapore as well, conservative decision makers tend not to bring new products into the organization very quickly.  In Korea, for example, there are many CEOs that want to stick with what brought them there.  That creates challenges for the organization when it comes to bringing a new technology into the business.

Decision making in places like South Korea is obviously very top heavy and that is starting to change a little bit.  Productivity is secondary often to the decision-making process inside an organization which reduces productivity.  I think SaaS is going to help that but it is really going to have to start at the top and work its way down.  Unlike the U.S. where products like Slack that have really been a bottom-up process that has feed into the organization.