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RE: Gartner finds lukewarm response to SaaS

Socratesfoot Updated - 9th Jul 2009

Technology experts are finally starting to admit that SaaS is being less favorably received then anticipated to spite their constant conjecture to the contrary. But was this really any more then an attempt to let the wolves in our door and promote SaaS in the first place. I can't believe it was a surprise to anyone that the slow economy didn't somehow boost service based applications into the spotlight as the next big thing replacing traditional operating systems, office suites, and productivity tools when the keystone to SaaS succeeding was trust of the service provider. In a bad economy, who is going to trust someone to own your data who can charge you anything to host it and can keep it away from you if you can't pay your bill.

We're in survival mode here. The experts have it backwards. SaaS favors a robust economy, not a weak one and their predictions on SaaS taking off in an economic slow down were counter-intuitive and ridiculously based on companies choosing between legally updating all their CALS, service contracts, and software or going with a less expensive subscription based service.

But with full time IT people being asked to trim their budgets or risk being replaced by consultants...using an old workstation as a new server, running on less then legal copies of Office, or having less then perfect backup procedures becomes quite commonplace and acceptable. It's not like the same job can't be done on old software if the alternative is loosing my job.

So SaaS like any software amounts to a cost, and like any other cost, it will suffer in hard economic times no matter what "they" say.