| Going 100 Percent SaaS |
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| Saturday, 06 September 2008 09:42 |
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I had a nice time yesterday with Rob Hull from Adaptive Planning, Jeff Schultz from Bill.com and Doug Harr from Ingres on a panel called “Going 100% SaaS” during Office 2.0 conference. You can see the full 45 minute video of the session. Gadi Shamia of Revongo moderated. The idea behind the panel was to talk about the state of the art in moving to a completely SaaS strategy for all of your systems - what the innovators are doing today, the benfits and challenges they are seeing, what the limits are, and what the industry needs to do to make this easier. We all had lots of fun in 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. Gadi Shamia, the moderator, posted a summary and his thoughts on his Ala 360 blog. Ben Kepes also covered it in his diversity.net blog. I won't repeat their summaries of the discussion and the insights they took away. If you take a look at their blogs you can quickly see all the good things that we covered, and once again you are welcome to watch the video of the session. I largely agree with both of their sentiments that while the panel was interesting and there some great insights and learnings that came out we never got to the some of the main points we wanted to discuss about the future of SaaS. The questions from the audience really dragged us back to the current state of SaaS - in a 45 minute session we couldn't both answer the questions about slow moving large enterprises that have not yet adopted SaaS and at the same time talk about all the things that we know the industry needs to do to help more innovative companies that have embraced and are benefiting from SaaS to get closer and closer to 100%. I think we'll have to reconvene the panel and do a webcast focusing specifically on the how close to 100% SaaS is realistic (or a good idea), and what we think the industry needs to do to help companies get there. Ben closes his post with "Maybe next year" - I don't want to wait that long - far too many companies are getting huge value from making 100% SaaS a strategic aspiration today. |