Like most CIOs I turn to analyst research firms to provide relevant insights for my business. I confess this week’s survey by Gartner left me scratching my head in puzzlement. This analysis of SaaS seems to position the category as fundamentally sick, even though 90% of the respondents indicated they were keeping their investments or growing them. And in this economic climate no less.
I also find it strange that they look at SaaS as some sort of homogenous category. What CIO goes to work and says “I’ve got to get some SaaS today” in response to their business challenges? Sure, you might choose SaaS over on-premise because of the many benefits (functionality, security, reliability to name a few), but if the underlying solution doesn’t solve your business needs, what’s the point? The SaaS decision is in-line or after the solution decision, not before. The stronger category alignment is to the solution, not to the delivery model. Did they account for this alignment in their survey?
And I’m always disappointed to see argumentative tricks. Look up panacea and let me know if you think it isn’t being used as a straw man fallacy to try to strengthen their point and drum up some more SaaS controversy.
I concur with your assessment (head scratch). Keep at it guys. We’re a 100 person young silicon valley company and we wouldn’t consider anything *but*
a SaaS model, except for our ASIC design (memory controllers and flash for design into MySQL servers).
Exchange and also SugarCRM today (sorry, not my decision). You can check us out at http://www.virident.com or (bobd@virident.com) home of greencloud computing.
PS.. is it winter yet in Bozeman? Chuckle chuckle, I have family in Ennis.