Thursday, August 14, 2008

Quick response to a silly blog

Normally, I have my own plans for what I want to post on my blog and I leave the fencing for the US women's Olympic team.
BUT, this morning I received an email from a friend who is also a CEO of a SaaS company, pointing out a new post with an outrageous title Why You Should Steer Your Customer Away from SaaS, for Now asking me to comment on it in my blog.

Frank's argument was that since Goggle's Gmail had an outage " just mention Google and Amazon's problems and a shadow of doubt can be place over the whole hosted applications market" He goes on to say that cloud computing (SaaS) "is just a pipe dream" and that we should resort to good old reliable client server technology.

I told my friendly CEO that it is such a non-issue that I don't think I should waste a good posting on it, but I did add a comment to the blog.
As the day went by and my comment was neither posted nor acknowledged, I decided to use this forum to respond.

So, my comment went something like this:
  1. I can't believe we are even having this discussion. This is not 2003 when people were discussing the merits of this novel delivery system. As Dave Rosenberg pointed yesterday in his Negative Approach blog "Software-as-a-Service is so common it's actually boring at this point"
  2. Frank's argument is as valid as steering customers away from motor cars back to horse drawn carts, because accidents happen.
  3. SaaS companies make a living out of providing these services. Although I do not have the statistics, I know from numerous interactions with many companies that your average SaaS uptime figures are far better than your average IT department's.
  4. Part of the success of SaaS has to do with the fact that IT was simply not delivering the goods, not in performance nor availability, so the business units went out looking for someone who could deliver a better service, NOW.
There. I don't think I need to splash in the mud much more. I must say though that I feel like I'm playing out a scene from Back to the Future IV.

1 comment:

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