Great Debate 11am ET/8am PT PC homebrewing and white-boxing: Dead or alive?

Topic: Cloud

VCs: What makes SaaS successful?

Summary: At the OnDemand conference in Palo Alto, Calif., venture capitalists debate the traits that make profitable SaaS companies and discuss what makes SaaS companies a worthwhile investment.

Topics: Cloud, Data Centers, Emerging Tech

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  • I beg to differ

    I believe the speaker excluding CAD/CAM and, by extension, PDM applications from the cloud model could be mistaken. Boeing set up "cloud" engineering environment to support the design of the 787 and, in fact, the 787 would have been impossible without the ability for engineers from multiple suppliers to collaborate in the design. I can see this model extending between companies like Solectron and their customers. These cloud applications may be "closed" today but future, more open scenarios are possible. By the way, I believe the sub-contractors were mandated by Boeing to use the cloud applications even though they may have had their own engineering systems.

    I also see the area of ERP related implementation tools to be well suited to a SaaS model. If a customer needs an ETL application to migrate data from a legacy system to a new ERP, whether cloud-based or not, the tools can be in the cloud. Why should a customer pay for software license, maintenance and incremental hardware for an application that is not required once the ERP is live?
    notblue
    Reply Vote
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