I had the opportunity to sit in on a session on "Software as a Service" at the C3 (Corporate & Channel Computing) conference going on this week in New York City. The panel consisted of IBM SaaS guru Dave Mitchell, JamCracker's Todd Johnson, and Intacct's Robert Jurkowski.
Some interesting points from the discussion about the SaaS subscription model:
These SaaS proponents predicted that all software will eventually be delivered under the SaaS model. "Since 2000, a lot of companies have purchased software that ended up as shelfware," said Jurkowski.
There was also some discussion about how the SaaS model will be delivered -- whether via individual software vendors themselves, or through SaaS aggregators.
The subscription model seems highly logical, the wave of the future, and the panelists here made a very convincing case of it. But vendors I'm spoken to so far that offer subscription models say that the main interest thus far is as a way for end users to test the software before eventually plunking down the money for a full-fledged license.
Perhaps there's still an innate fear of reliquinshing control of valuable corporate assets -- in this case, applications, and to some extent, data -- to a third party.