No more hiding in the server room
Resisting SaaS For IT Management? Bad Career Move, Dinosaur
The question is very simple: are you going to be dragged by the business people in your organization to introduce SaaS solutions into your IT management environment, or are you going to lead your organization to it?
The Extinction Has Begun
In the past 10 years, SaaS has become a mainstream delivery model for many business applications such as Customer Relationship Management (Salesforce.com, Oracle On-Demand), Email/Calendar/Collaboration (Google Apps for your domain), and Operating Systems as a service (Microsoft Azure). SaaS solutions have also been introduced in the IT Management domain, with thousands of IT professionals leveraging SaaS to be able to spend less time on the ‘plumbing’ of IT (e.g the infrastructure layer) and spend more time on delivering a service to the different business units.
* Online backup (Mozy, IronMountain,IBM)
* Desktop Management (Kaseya)
* Email Archiving/security (Google/Postini,Dell/MessageOne)
More examples can be found on Jeff Kaplan’s SaaS Showplace.
There are many benefits of SaaS over on-premise solutions, including but not limited to:
Lower Cost – Most SaaS solutions are offered at a lower subscription cost (Monthly/Quarterly/Yearly) with no up-front fees, compared to on-premise solutions. Much of the savings are realized because of the SaaS vendor’s lower cost of sales and a lower cost of deployment. The subscription model means that funds are coming out of the operating expense budget and not from the capital expense one.
Simpler Solution – The less software and hardware components installed on-premise, the simpler & faster the solution deployment becomes. The time to value is much faster compared to on-premise solutions – usually measured in minutes.
Lower Risk – No shelfware! In a SaaS model the customer can unsubscribe or cancel the subscription, and with no databases and application servers to install, this means lower overall risk to IT and the business.
Faster Innovation – User community innovation is what drives most SaaS companies’ roadmaps. Unlike On-premise solutions,where new functionality is generally introduced twice a year, a SaaS Company, using an Agile development methodology can introduce new functionality every 6-8 weeks. Moreover, due to the complexity associated with upgrading on-premise solutions, most customers go through the upgrade only during scheduled maintenance windows. This means at any given time, the customer is anywhere from 9-12 months behind the latest and greatest functionality available.
SaaS Data Management applications simplify the traditional on-premise deployment process and eliminate the need for additional:
* Compute resources
* DB resources
* Storage Resources
* Agents
* Software changes / updates
* Backing-up / replicating the IT management App infrastructure itself…
So either SaaS your IT management or get off the pot. And here’s a list of recommended reading:
* The Big switch
* Who moved my cheese
* What killed the dinosaur
The Extinction Has Begun
In the past 10 years, SaaS has become a mainstream delivery model for many business applications such as Customer Relationship Management (Salesforce.com, Oracle On-Demand), Email/Calendar/Collaboration (Google Apps for your domain), and Operating Systems as a service (Microsoft Azure). SaaS solutions have also been introduced in the IT Management domain, with thousands of IT professionals leveraging SaaS to be able to spend less time on the ‘plumbing’ of IT (e.g the infrastructure layer) and spend more time on delivering a service to the different business units.
* Online backup (Mozy, IronMountain,IBM)
* Desktop Management (Kaseya)
* Email Archiving/security (Google/Postini,Dell/MessageOne)
More examples can be found on Jeff Kaplan’s SaaS Showplace.
There are many benefits of SaaS over on-premise solutions, including but not limited to:
Lower Cost – Most SaaS solutions are offered at a lower subscription cost (Monthly/Quarterly/Yearly) with no up-front fees, compared to on-premise solutions. Much of the savings are realized because of the SaaS vendor’s lower cost of sales and a lower cost of deployment. The subscription model means that funds are coming out of the operating expense budget and not from the capital expense one.
Simpler Solution – The less software and hardware components installed on-premise, the simpler & faster the solution deployment becomes. The time to value is much faster compared to on-premise solutions – usually measured in minutes.
Lower Risk – No shelfware! In a SaaS model the customer can unsubscribe or cancel the subscription, and with no databases and application servers to install, this means lower overall risk to IT and the business.
Faster Innovation – User community innovation is what drives most SaaS companies’ roadmaps. Unlike On-premise solutions,where new functionality is generally introduced twice a year, a SaaS Company, using an Agile development methodology can introduce new functionality every 6-8 weeks. Moreover, due to the complexity associated with upgrading on-premise solutions, most customers go through the upgrade only during scheduled maintenance windows. This means at any given time, the customer is anywhere from 9-12 months behind the latest and greatest functionality available.
SaaS Data Management applications simplify the traditional on-premise deployment process and eliminate the need for additional:
* Compute resources
* DB resources
* Storage Resources
* Agents
* Software changes / updates
* Backing-up / replicating the IT management App infrastructure itself…
So either SaaS your IT management or get off the pot. And here’s a list of recommended reading:
* The Big switch
* Who moved my cheese
* What killed the dinosaur
Views: 30
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Robert Chipperfield on -
That blog you posted is going to keep me up at night.
Sorry :-). One of the things I love about those guys (my home ISP) is that they do at least tell you when things go wrong, what they're doing to fix them, and what happened afterwards. On the rare occasions that I am left offline, it's very reassuring to be sitting in an IRC channel (via a 3G dongle of course!) being fed updates by the guys working on the problem, knowing that I've not been forgotten about. If all companies did that, I'd be very happy!
But I digress - sleep well!
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Permalink Reply by Wesley "Nonapeptide" on
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Very cool that they use IRC to keep in contact with their customers!! I might borrow that idea and create some kind of live chat feature for my company users to keep in contact with me. Of course, that could backfire completely and be a massive distraction. I say this as I cast a venomous glance at my Digsby buddy list that is logged into about 7 different accounts. At least IRC isn't quite as noob oriented as IM networks are so not everyone's Auntie will be pestering them. But still, that kind of customer interaction and transparency is something that all IT people can learn from. It would be even cooler if SaaS companies did that so you'd have something more to say then "The provider is working on it... I hope."
Why use IM/IRC when everyone in my office has a desk phone? Pah! Phones are so early 2000s.
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Permalink Reply by Robert Chipperfield on
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Adrian Kennard, AAISP's director, did joke about having an IT competency test before you were allowed to become one of their customers (they target the geekier end of the market to say the least)...
I reckon it could actually work for them - it has a kind of viral marketing appeal. People would want to go and find out if they're good enough!
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