Business
SDForum: IBM's Mooney on SaaS
IBM's Gerry Mooney was the second of two keynote speakers at SDForum's SaaS (software as a service) conference today. Mooney, the VP of Corporate Strategy at Big Blue, avoided most of the pitch-speak heard throughout the day and instead shared his ideas of the software as a service model and the on-demand era, stating that is the rudest awakening of uncertainty since the Depression.
Mooney said that the mainframe and the client/server eras are still important and are not going away. But they are not fueling investments any longer, all the opportunity now lies in the on-demand era.
The goal, he said, is to create integrated applications available online that provide "restaurant-in-a-box" functionality, which can be replicated across industries but have the ability to scale horizontally.
He sees SaaS as a disruptive business model, and advises those looking to jump in to be as articulate as possible about what their platform looks like, and then: "to be at the right place at the right time with the right end-to-end solutions, at the right price point as the market takes off."