Up Close & Personal with Vendors' SaaS Plans

I am currently assisting a client in the definition of their strategy for the next three to five years. As a part of the process I have engaged with the vendors of the key applications in my client’s application architecture. There is a good variety of applications from ERP systems to finance, HR and payroll as well as a few other nice products. It was particularly interesting to get up close and personal with the vendors in terms of their SaaS plans. A couple of things struck me in this regard.

Firstly there was a strong move towards Software As a Service amongst ‘traditional’ software vendors for whom SaaS threatens traditional license and professional service fees. All of the vendors to a greater or lesser extent were planning cloud based versions of their applications. While for many this was not necessarily a great commercial proposition it was clear that customers were demanding SaaS offerings and that the vendors were beginning to respond.

Secondly, it was clear that while SaaS versions of the applications were being planned, for many vendors the multi tenant model demanded by SaaS was going to mean a significant change to the technology platform and data models underpinning their applications. Given this customers should consider carefully when it is the right time for them to migrate to these offerings!

Thirdly, all the vendors I met were planning to begin by delivering point or module based SaaS solutions that could be used standalone or in some cases interfaced with on premises versions of their applications rather than starting by completely rebuilding their current application.

Finally and perhaps most importantly I suspect that the vendors, while outwardly committed to SaaS based offerings, were unsure how it would really impact their business and that of their customers. Nevertheless given the variety of applications and vendors I met I became even more convinced that SaaS is going mainstream.