Gap Widening between On-Premise and SaaS

Posted by Margaret Dawson on March 24, 2010

Brian Sommer, former Accenture partner and IT guru, wrote a great blog this week in ZDNet about the widening gap between on-premise software companies and those providing SaaS-based solutions. He states three key areas on-premise vendors are struggling with, namely:

1. Getting multi-tenancy to work with their products.

2. Getting a Platform as a Service (PaaS) integrated with their SaaS solution.

3. Getting Integration as a Service (IaaS) incorporated into the solution set.

On point one, while people get weary talking cloud architecture, there is a big difference between a single-tenant and multi-tenant environment. True SaaS provides a multi-tenant archiecture, in which the application provides secure, partitioned areas (often called virtual instances) for different sets of data within a single instance. So, each company gets its unique and typically customized view of the application.

In addition to the points above, Sommer notes that SaaS vendors are moving with more agility: “I’d say the gap between the nimble, fast moving SaaS vendors and the on-premise vendors is widening. Any vendor can claim to be innovative, that only takes a press release to state as much. But, speedy innovation or fast-paced innovation is another thing altogether. SaaS vendors are kicking the on-premise vendors but good in this race.”

Read the whole blog: http://blogs.zdnet.com/sommer/?p=811