July 13, 2010

Yes – The SaaS ‘Experiment’ Is Over

For the past two weeks, I’ve been debating whether to respond to a commentary in InfoWorld by Neil McAllister which asked, “Is the SaaS Experiment Finally Over?”

But, I couldn’t hold back any longer when one of the many online publications where I’m a contributor, eBizQ, posed the question in a more provocative fashion, “Is SaaS Dead?”

I couldn’t bring myself to respond to McAllister’s column when it was first published because his argument was so ludicrous. He alluded to a variety of past SaaS and cloud vendor service outages to raise concerns about the overall viability of these rapidly expanding markets. And he used a series of Gartnerisms to warn against developer migration to the SaaS model.  

Yet, McAllister ignores the pervasive failures of traditional on-premise software which has inspired organizations of all sizes to explore and increasingly adopt SaaS alternatives to better meet their corporate needs.

The truth is that Gartner has been wrong about SaaS since the beginning. Even today, it has failed to fully recognize the current rate of SaaS adoption because they only talk to their traditional IT clients who are still trying to resist today’s trends because they see them as a threat to their jobs.

For instance, I reported earlier this year about Pacific Crest’s CIO survey which found that they expect to spend approximately 30% of their software budgets on SaaS in 2010, while Gartner is still predicting that organizations will only spend 25% of their budgets on SaaS by 2012.

Gartner also refuses to recognize the growing array of customer success stories which clearly illustrate the tangible and measurable business benefits being generated by SaaS and the broader cloud computing services.

Meanwhile, THINKstrategies has been recognizing SaaS and cloud computing providers nearly every week for the past year and a half which are delivering these business benefits worldwide through our Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) and Cloud Computing Business Value Award programs.

Rather than acknowledge the benefits of SaaS, and other cloud computing services, Gartner prefers to publish endless warnings which simply propose commonsense vendor selection and management principles.

The fact is that the SaaS ‘experiment’ is definitely over. It is now a mainstream movement.

Just take a look at the growth of Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors. Or, check out how NetSuite and Workday are encroaching on SAP. Listen to CIOs who are frustrated with being in the server business and want to shift into the services business.

And, pay attention to the major moves which the ‘legacy’ hardware and software players–led by IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP–are taking to transform and even cannibalize their traditional business to respond to rapidly escalating customer demands for change.

Yes, the SaaS experiment is over. It is now for real.

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