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Software as a Service
Who stands to lose if SaaS gains momentum? Anyone whose economic foundation is based on desktop applications - Microsoft, for example. While Microsoft may be getting into SaaS, it will likely turn into a political battle there because the majority of their revenue is based on desktop applications, and the development of software with ever increasing desktop requirements (CPU, memory, etc.). In-house IT departments may resist SaaS. They have quite a bit of motivation to stay in the driver seat with respect to IT decision making, while SaaS gives more options to end-users (why use company email and collaboration solutions where somebody in IT is monitoring my messages, for example). IT departments are also pre-aligned with Microsoft, while other departments may be more open to the provider of the biggest bang for the buck. In-house developers may resist SaaS. That may include the majority of people reading these forums. Developers are predisposed to creating things in-house, and leveraging their intimate knowledge of company quirks and addressing them via custom solutions. Maybe some of that could be mitigated by SaaS providers allowing customers to deploy their own extensions to provider hosted applications. Nathan M. Andelin
Who stands to lose if SaaS gains momentum? Anyone whose economic foundation is based on desktop applications - Microsoft, for example. While Microsoft may be getting into SaaS, it will likely turn into a political battle there because the majority of their revenue is based on desktop applications, and the development of software with ever increasing desktop requirements (CPU, memory, etc.). In-house IT departments may resist SaaS. They have quite a bit of motivation to stay in the driver seat with respect to IT decision making, while SaaS gives more options to end-users (why use company email and collaboration solutions where somebody in IT is monitoring my messages, for example). IT departments are also pre-aligned with Microsoft, while other departments may be more open to the provider of the biggest bang for the buck. In-house developers may resist SaaS. That may include the majority of people reading these forums. Developers are predisposed to creating things in-house, and leveraging their intimate knowledge of company quirks and addressing them via custom solutions. Maybe some of that could be mitigated by SaaS providers allowing customers to deploy their own extensions to provider hosted applications. Nathan M. Andelin
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