Few days back, I met Rajesh while he was in Singapore and enjoyed meeting and discussing with him. During the discussions, he pointed me to Amy Wohl blogging in the IBM site. Subsequently he blogged about it here.Writing on SaaS - Amy writes, Not All Software is/will be a Service
- rightly so , I think and she is spot on when she writes, Whenever we get a Big Idea, it is human nature to think that it is the silver bullet, the solution to every problem we encounter. Most Big Ideas are great for some things, maybe even most things, but rarely are they good at everything.There are some places where SaaS doesn’t apply yet and there may be some places where it won’t ever apply. . Some excerpts with edits and comments from a well written piece:
Good SaaS Applications :
(1) Net native applications, written to be delivered from a shared server, across the web, to a diverse population of customers who will be able to administer their own accounts. Over time more and more applications, of every variety, will be available from such platforms.
(2) Applications for which there is no differentiating value to enterprises - like email and human resources, as these are mature, well understood, and fairly homogeneous from one company to another.
(3) Applications need only for occasional use or one used by limited people which are expensive to install and support.
Bad SaaS Applications :
(1) The application is mission critical and management nervous about keeping it outside- but security is getting better all the time and your data can be processed in an SaaS environment without necessarily being stored there.
(2) Where heavy duty/code level customization is involved. SaaS is really for standard versions of applications, with some modifications possible through decisions made in dialogues.
(3) Applications that can’t support multi-user environment and forcing it to do so makes it very expensive or very slow.
(4) The vendor whose licensing models are not SaaS model compatible. The realities of the marketplace will bring lagging vendors into line with the new market rules.
Category : SaaS
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