SaaS - and end of summer

Well not really, I still have my breakfast outside, in shorts - but I'm taking the cue from a post by Jeff - Back to business.

Yep, today two of my sons are back in school and my oldest is packing his guitar and other important belongings before moving to London next week to study maths and physics. Going to miss him.

And the auto-generated messages of "I'm on vacation but will read my mails when back in office" seems to have stopped. Perhaps the - still - lack of response can be blamed on post-vacation email bankruptcy and overflowing inboxes?

Ah well, have to be patient, I know the feeling...

Anyway, back to Jeff; in said post he questioned the real profitability of SaaS. And I suspect some of our fellow Enterprise Irregulars might disagree with the tone of Jeff's observation. Only a few days ago the EIs had a vivid discussion about SaaS spurred by the views of the Lawson CEO that SaaS simply won't cut it. Seems most EIs came down in defence of the SaaS model one way or the other.

The SaaS issue is of course of interest to me, it should be as Thingamy requires only a browser and can thus run on any server - mine or theirs or even some big infrastructure company's.

Add that I'm sometimes asked "why are you not going the SaaS path?", usually served in a critical tone.

Am I waffling?

Thing is I do not get all the hoopla around the term SaaS. Why this elevation to a higher level of importance?

In my simple mind I see it only as a practical issue - like "what OS are you running" kind of thing. Nothing to get ruffled by, nothing to get excited about, simply a thing of "ah, ok, sure I'll host it for you" or "sure, here's a little file, click on it and run with it".

If I'm a slightly paranoid customer (and who's not?) I would like to keep it on my server, whirring in the back room or cooled off in some state-of-the-art server park. I'd like to look after my own backups just like I have to check the brakes on my bike myself before I set off on a Sunday ride. Adjusting derailleurs or setting up cronjobs, screwdrivers or rsync, same diff.

Still, sometimes I can see that a have-no-clue-what-ssh-is small organisation person would like the stuff to run off a server in the cloud. No problem with that, and actually no problem with offering that.

In that case I would say that on top of a license fee the client would have to pay for the lease/rent of the server and the usual support services. Not a big problem I would say, quite fair and a tit-for-tat business deal.

As for the underlying deal - why could it not be the same wherever the software is located? Pay as you go. Use it, pay up. Do not use it, stop paying. Upgrades included. There is no reason at all in my mind that anybody should be locked in for any period, and that includes the ability to export your data if you decide to leave.

That leaves the SaaS-or-not decision to parameters like rent-or-buy, support service or DIY, flimsy local power supply vs. flimsy broadband line. Decisions similar to day-to-day choices like buying a car, renting a video or having the bikeshop check your bike.

Thus I cannot see why such mundane issues should warrant long and heated debates - and definitely not warranting a business classification all by it's own.

Well, it's end of summer and I have some server related issues to work on so now I have to get back to some humdrum tasks... :)

Comments

[Lee Chisholm]

Hey Sig,
This was actually a really interesting blog to read... I know I remember fielding the exact question to you once. "Why not SaaS up Thingamy and makes a zillion dollars off of it that way too??!".

I guess though SaaS is actually a little over-hyped when you break it down to it's parts. There's software, and then there's hosting. SaaS is just the combination of those two things. When you really think about it, not offering the ability to split the two apart is highly inflexible.

One could still be a wonderful SaaS vendor, but perhaps they would score a few extra bonus points if they offered the ability to buy the software outright for use on personal / corporate internal servers.

[sig]

Hey Lee, and thanks :)

Guess also that there's one aspect often forgotten for software designed to run as a server (i.e. communicate through TCP/IP) and that would be the hassle of installing.

Often it requires setting up and configuring separate systems beyond the core software you're selling - typically DBMS and webserver - making onsite versions a bitch to start up.

Me being very, very lazy Thingamy is set up to behave like it was any simple app running locally - DBMS and webserver are both intricate part of it, the only thing to choose would be 1. what DB to run (pick from list in interface upon start up, only if more than one present) and 2. what port to use (defaulting to 9000 but can use any chosen one).