One of the other interesting conversations I had while at SaaSCon was with couple of gentlemen, one from a company that offers quality process documentation solutions and the other from a leading investment banking financial applications software maker.
In the case of the quality process documentation company, they went from an on-premise model to a multi-instance model to potentially transition to a complete SaaS solution. However, in their case some of their customers are still interested in an on-premise model, especially the larger clients.
The financial apps company has currently products that are in the traditional on-premise mode and this person was responsible for assessing the need and feasibility of transitioning to a SaaS model. Due to the nature of their products that handle sensitive financial data, he was not sure if SaaS will be an acceptable model for their clients in reality. Even though there was a lot of interest from users in Saas & Web 2.0 as well as being able to mash-up data from their application.
These scenrios seems to indicate that SaaS maybe coming full-circle from going from an on-premise model to SaaS and now companies like Sugar CRM are offering the Sugar Cube as an on-premise solution. For on-premise software companies who are on the fence, it is inevitable that moving to SaaS will eventually be the right approach because it will widen their market reach to SMBs and capturing this long tail market. There is a very interesting and detailed paper on this topic titled “Application Marketplaces and the Money Trail” by Microsoft’s Fred Chong. The SaaS on-premise appliances will help them still address the needs of their larger clients who insist that their data is hosted on premise.
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