The SaaS blogosphere is all a twitter (pun intended) this week over a remarkable interview published earlier this week on ZDnet, titled Lawson's CEO, Harry Debes, doesn't believe in software-as-a-service (SaaS), in which the CEO of Lawson Software compares enterprise software companies to cocaine dealers, says SaaS is going to be dead in two years, and implies that his own customers are stupid. I wrote about it on my SaaS 2.0 blog, and many of the other SaaS bloggers have covered it as well — Jason Corsello, Anshu Sharma, Vinnie Mirchandani, Bob Warfield, Josh Greenbaum, Ryan Nichols and Jeff Kaplan.
There was also a story in the Financial Times this week that received less blogger coverage called The End of the Software Gravy Train, which follows a widely ready Sarah Lacey story in Business Week last month about how hard SaaS is for traditional enterprise software vendors.
We are clearly starting to see repeating themes over and over again in regards to SaaS and the large enterprise software vendors. A focus on company profits instead of on what is good for customers — and nearly always no discussion of the customer at all. Vision limited to developing more and more features to increase complexity and drive upgrade cycles. A dependence on buyer lock-in and the resultant nearly 100% profit maintenance and support revenue streams. Massive innovator's dilemma issues, structural challenges and internal conflict.
I can't think of a better setup for the panel of line of business execs in the going 100% SaaS panel on Friday morning from Intacct, Ingres, Bill.com and Adaptive Planning that are all moving the market towards being able to run your business 100% on-demand, and are all out there doing the same inside their own companies. I would also direct your attention to this excellent post from Susan Scrupski of nGenera as an example of a company that's grown from zero to $100 million in a year and is going 100% SaaS in the process.
What do you do where you are unable to beat Oracle and SAP in their own fields? What do you do when your company can not innovate? What do you do when SFDC, Netsuite, Intacct... is eating your future growth? What do you do when your share value is cut in half from your IPO? You throw mud. If you describe to any press is good press, we all just gave Debes a huge PR boost...