Legacy Software Models in Trouble?
Sep 23rd, 2009 by Philip Meese
Most of us recognize that the SaaS model is here to stay. An interesting article by John Foley gives us some new perspective on just how far the SaaS model has reached in changing the way business does computing.
Christopher Lochhead (former CMO at Mercury Interactive) makes a good point when he says that one of the most important aspects of SaaS is how it changes the acquisition model for companies: what previously took months for a purchase now can be done in hours or days. But this may be overly simplistic: staff still needs retraining and business processes need to be adjusted or redesigned around these new systems – that’s a given – in most cases…
When adopting a new SaaS application, let’s say migrating from Act to SalesForce, user retraining and business process remapping is required to make an effective transition.This can be a time consuming and expensive proposition all by itself.
The lower cost solution for those who are happy with the software they’re using is to do a relatively painless migration to an on-demand IT Infrastructure. Sometimes referred to as hosted applications, the true on-demand IT Infrastructure has SaaS model pricing (fixed cost per seat) and must be a one-stop shop where all applications a business relies on are hosted on a single platform. This releases the business from the need for owning servers, associated hardware and software and employing staff to manage all that.
That’s my 2 cents for today – happy cloud computing!
