I arrived in San Francisco for the Office 2.0 conference where everything SaaS pervades the agenda and the conference ambience - very little paper showing agendas, slides, messages - everything in the cloud. In the backdrop, the Republicans were busy bashing Obama at their convention.
And I read my friend George Gilbert's column at Sandhill.com. Just a couple of weeks ago he and I were debating on-premise and SaaS in between catching up about his sabbatical (which I am very envious of)
George is right - and I have lamented before - SaaS has not matured enough beyond core horizontal functionality.
But that is no reason to keep buying on-premise software. After earning billions and promising "wall to wall" coverage, the major enterprise vendors have not delivered vertical suites to so many industries from healthcare to utilities to banks. And where they have tried, their vertical pricing, exacerbated by their systems integration partner costs, make custom development look so much more attractive. The majority of on-premise customers paid a bucketload for shiny financial functionality and ran out of budget and stamina.
So when you hear George or Harry of Lawson pick on SaaS they sound like Republicans who keep saying SaaS, aka Obama, does not have "much experience" - when their own track record the last few years is actually the big issue at hand.
For the record, I voted for Bush and also over the last decade have advised many a client to buy SAP, Oracle and Lawson.
But the joy of being an Independent is I can call a spade a spade. The on-premise vendors need to show they are truly changing, dramatically reducing TCO, offering deep vertical functionality not just attacking SaaS for "lack of experience" , er lack of "enterprise wide" coverage.
