SaaS style offerings seem to be everywhere yet adoption in any category, except perhaps CRM is very limited. Zoli Erdos notes that:
There are estimates that about 10% of all software sold is SaaS today, but investors have look out years ahead, and the writing is clearly on the wall: only SaaS gets funded today
That should bring some comfort to Stefan Topfer, who is concerned the SaaS message is proving difficult to make stick. I’m not so sure Stefan is entirely right, given his recent growth stats. It is fair ot say that SaaS’ time has come – as has the notion of innovative solutions that just work.
But it’s when you read Phil Wainewright’s enthusiastic eulogy around NetSuite’s latest version and salesforce.com’s latest acquisition that you start to get a sense of where new technologies and the customer centric view of development and take us:
What I find exciting about NetSuite isn’t the technology, it’s what the vendor has done with it — it’s given business users control over their information (re: NetSuite)
Compare that to the new model, in which … oh, it works already. You already have an application hosted on AppExchange. You already pay the Unlimited client subscription. Which means you already deployed to that device. The only thing you may have to do is tweak your application to make sure it fits with the screen and keyboard quirks of that particular mobile device, but that’s only going to take a savvy developer a day or two to sort. There’s no contest here. This is on an utterly different planet from the old model. (re: salesforce.com)
How much more persuasion do users need? Ok – it may take time for the penny to drop as I outlined in my last post but when it does, I suspect it will be hook. line and sinker.
