Going 100% SaaS

ddruker — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 17:44:06 GMT

I enjoyed the 100% SaaS session yesterday, but have to say that I felt a bit unfulfilled in the end. We all had lots of fun with the preparation for the panel. Doug Harr's view that 100% SaaS means that your whole IT infrastructure simplifies down to a wireless router in your communications closet is certainly a provocative one.

We had lots of spirited discussion on what we saw as the boundaries (none of us think 100% SaaS is truly realistic today, particularly when you think about desktop software, personal productivity, telephony, file sharing, data warehousing, etc.), but all of us are seeing more and more companies, including our own firms, at 80% or 90% SaaS, and we all are getting tremendous benefits from this.

The questions from the audience took us more into the current state of SaaS than into what we think the future looks like, and what we know the industry needs to do to move the needle more and more toward 100%.

Here is some additional coverage:

I've got some deeper thoughts on my SaaS 2.0 blog.
Gadi Shamia has a summary of the panel and his thoughts on his Ala 360 blog.
Ben Kepes also covered the panel in his diversity.net blog.

It's About Going 100% SaaS — Not 0%

ddruker — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:22:06 GMT

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.

Daniel Druker's Blog

Going 100% SaaS

It's About Going 100% SaaS — Not 0%