Thomas,

All good points. My biggest issue with the Gartner survey is they assume the survey taker can objectively provide an opinion on the vast SaaS market generally.

Survey results from Car & Driver magazine stating, "Drivers are underwhelmed by cars" would be just as useless, leaving the reader to wonder what drivers and what cars? Are they referring to a Yugo or a BMW?

SaaS means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Like I said, you hit the nail on the head with your post. I blog about it here and admittedly come to many of the same conclusions.

Best regards,

@rglauser
Service-now.com

Some excellent points raised. It seems that enterprises (and ISVs) would benefit from being able to run both deployment modes (SaaS and On-Premise) at the same time. The problem is how to achieve this cost-effectively without having to go through two development and maintenance efforts. I've done my best to explain how Magic Software's application platform tackles this issue in my blog. You'll see that using a platform such as uniPaaS allows you to develop, deploy and maintain SaaS & On-Premise business models from the same single codebase - an important benefit when IT budgets are on the squeeze.

I couldn't agree more. Like all "hot" new technological phenomena, SaaS truly is over hyped right now and is clearly not ready to replace Enterprise software across the board as Timothy Chou predicts in "The End of Software". From a technical perspective there is the scale issue. And there are concerns, whether well-founded or not, regarding security, especially among executives at many of the larger financial services and insurance institutions. I do believe that some form of Saas/On Demand will have its day, but when that will be and what that will look like is anybody's guess right now.

For the past week I have seen the Gartner research findings being discussed in one way or another. Kudos to you for pointing out the huge elephant in the room; the internal findings point to high levels of satisfaction (those staying with or implementing more SaaS) rather than the minutia of respondents who voiced their less than satisfactory opinions of SaaS solutions and were highlighted as a 'Key Findings'.

I believe there is an opportunity for both on-premise and SaaS and they should get along. There is no solution that is right for every organization and every environment and feel the emergence of SaaS in recent years has only provided a more eclectic menu of offerings to the buyer.

As SaaS vendors, we do need to continue to focus on the second 'S' in SaaS, the Service to ensure those innovators that ride the SaaS Tsunami wave are getting what they want and need.

When Dorothy asked the scarecrow “which way to the Emerald City”, he first pointed to left, then pointed to the right, and then finally pointed in both directions. The analogy is the goal is to get to Emerald city, not an ideological path to the left or right.

Ideology always has a way of getting in the way for rationality as pointed out in this excellent piece. I might also add a bit of history to the aforementioned ideology battles; remember the OS/2 vs. Windows? If you do, you will also likely remember where Gartner came down on that one.

Today’s managers need options and SaaS is a growing and viable option for many traditional on premise applications.

I am a CMO of SaaS company so I have a bias, but I also worked in the enterprise software industry for 20 years. I am familiar with both flavors of Kool-Aide. I respect and understand that all on premise applications will not be SaaS-ed overnight and many may never be but, SaaS is here to stay for more than just the “pay as you go” pricing models.

What the SaaS model provides is agility and choice for line of business managers and IT professionals and adds a refreshing perspective in the balancing of “ease of use” with “robust” feature function completeness. Many of today’s SaaS offerings have taken the opportunity to rethink the problem set and tried to reduce the complexity of implementation and have broken new ground in end user design and self service.

The SaaS model is also good for software developers that are building today’s new SaaS offerings. Life is much simpler when you know the exact hardware and operating configuration you will be running on in production. This simple fact assures us we will see more SaaS offerings in the future.

Lastly, SaaS companies today are built lean and have little of the enterprise software “go-to-market” costs and constantly are looking for ways to reduce costs. We could all learn from Apple who dropped the cost of the iPhone while adding more features! When was the last time an enterprise software vendor did the same?