Office 2.0 Conference - Looking Forward
September 12th, 2008
Ben Kepes penned a nice summary of the Office 2.0 conference and one complaint I liked is that the session on going 100% SaaS still focused a bit too much on justifying “why SaaS”. This has been nagging at me as well lately - all the chatter about whether or not 100% SaaS makes sense, and whether or not there are 7 myths about SaaS, etc.
The Vision Thing
All the time spent debating positions which are already clear does take time away from the “vision thing”. In fact I suppose we are in a bit of our own “silly season” in this debate about how to provision IT! So here is the vision in my view: we are now in a position to run a reasonably sized business in many industries without building a data center and without traditional “outsourcing” of IT for that business. If there is a need for corporate offices, we can occupy those offices, install an internet access line, put a wireless router in the corner, set up simple directory, file, and print services and get to work. All business applications can be provided via SaaS offerings now on the market. Increasingly, some are turning to SaaS for office productivity suites as well, as was demonstrated at Office 2.0. All custom applications requirements that arise can be provisioned via open source software, which is suited not just for web applications but for reporting, content management and even some business applications. This is not a dream, it is a reality and the future will see repeated examples of this strategy.
The Whole Package
As the company rolls out this technique, they will be able to deal with single sign-on, integration, and global reporting in ways already proven to be cost effective and fit to task. Some of these functions can be set up effectively on premise as we do at Ingres today with our BI reporting appliance. And yes of course, some companies particularly in some industries will not be able to select SaaS offerings for one or more business applications and some may reject them altogether. But in my view, it’s just a matter of time before nearly all software is delivered in this way - it’s simply good business, and fits the vision.
