I've mentioned the Intellect document "The Business Case for Software as a Service" (SaaS) before. It's the best. well-balanced document I've seen on the subject. As it says in the introduction "This paper ... examines the commonly claimed benefits ... also takes a hard look at the questions that need to be asked before considering SaaS...."
Having said that I do not agree with everything said, and there's a couple of key points missing. More on that separately.
The point I disagree with most strongly is in the conclusion "We recognise that SaaS isn't for everyone and for all circumstances...". Sure SaaS applications are essentially packaged software, and generally can't be modified. But with that one proviso, why shouldn't cloud SaaS be for everyone and all other circumstances?
The benefits are considerable, and the key risks are identified. The risks are not insurmountable, in most if not all cases at reasonable cost. So why doesn't the cloud industry aim higher - to be for everyone, in most circumstances?
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I'm glad you like the document. As chairman of the Intellect SaaS group I was the main editor of "The Business Case for Software as a Service". The document had over 20 contributors from small SaaS startups to Microsoft. The professional author we employed to bring all of the arguments in to sensible, jargon free English and one voice did a great job (you should have seen it before he started!). It covers Software aaS, but not Infrastructure aaS or Platform aaS. Because of the limitations of standard SaaS (packaged) applications, it quite rightly concludes that SaaS might not be for everybody (although I would contend standard SaaS applications can, potentially, cover an awful lot of ground and work for most businesses).
ReplyDeleteIf we did a similar document to cover the Cloud business case as a whole I believe we could have concluded that there aren't any applications or business processes that could not be handled by Cloud technology, although you could argue there might be performance issues with graphic intensive application like CAD. I asked this very question during a panel at CCWF last week, and the consensus seemed to be that for most applications, Cloud was perfectly viable, but there was a recognition that some organizations (like Banks) might still have issues over data security. Having said that, one of the Intellect members and contributors to the report is called Ffastfill and they sell a SaaS bank trading solution. It is currently being used by 49 of the top 50 banks in the world.