In an article on Silicon.com, Quocirca's Bob Tarzey makes some interesting observations about the trumped up war between on-premise and on-demand software.
Although some companies like Salesforce.com proclaim that SaaS will eventually bring on the "death of software," most companies are a little bit less into the ideological wars behind software delivery modes and tend to just look for the right tool for the job. I definitely agree that SaaS isn't about to take over the world and be the tool of choice for every situation, at least not in the near future.
But the thing I don't quite agree with is that very many situations exist where you need on-premise software out of principle, such as is Microsoft's assertion behind its "software plus services" initiative. Yes, sometimes the SaaS based alternatives don't offer necessary features for a particular need or a company might have extreme concerns about data security or similar issues. However, that's not because of an inherent superiority of locally installing applications vs. accessing them through a browser. I would imagine that, over time, as technology advances that most limitations of the SaaS delivery model will be overcome. Whether that means everything will be through SaaS in the future is something I do not know, but I just am not seeing why companies would always need something more than a Web browser to have real software functionality.
What do you think? Are there instances where on-premise software will be always necessary even as the technology evolves? Please post comments below.
First thing that comes to mind is "office productivity" software. AKA, Microsoft Office.
I see more and more companies providing laptops, giving employees the ability to work on their "documents" at work, home, and on the road, with or without an Internet connection. On demand office applications will have to get really good offline support before even making a dent in Office's share of the market.
That argument about 'offline support' made much more sense 3, 4, 10 years ago. There is a dramatic rise in availability of both wired and wireless broadband around the world, and not just the first world. I have it on my bus to work, and airlines are even making wireless available on planes. So needing to work on something like a document does not equal needing to have it locally on your disconnected hard drive.