The Truth About Software as a Service (SaaS)
Vendors say software as a service will cut costs and increase efficiency. They say it's enterprise ready. Does that sound too good to be true? It is.
The Future: One SaaS Step at a Time
As the industry matures, enterprises may find that they can depend on SaaS for more mission-critical needs, perhaps even one day running their ERP applications in that model. “I would consider ERP via SaaS,” says Scientific Games’ CTO Steve Beason, “but I would need to get protected financially, not just feel comfortable about failure recovery.”
But there’s a lot more work to be done before that can happen, notes Gartner’s Pring. SaaS is possible today because there’s less custom enterprise code than in the past. “Twenty-five years ago, it was all custom code; 15 years ago, ERP applications were packaged and reduced custom code,” Pring recalls. But custom code today still accounts for about 60 percent of enterprise software, meaning there are a lot of areas that SaaS just can’t handle.
Galen Gruman is a frequent contributor to CIO.
