Beware of the “SaaS” Trap

There’s a disturbing trend reemerging in our client inquiries of late: rising demand for software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions and purchases of solutions that are not really SaaS. When we inform clients that the solution they’re talking about isn’t SaaS, we are increasingly hearing, “So what? As long as I don’t have to run it, it’s better.” This is a trap that can cost you more, result in less agility, and lock you into a poor sourcing decision. Too many vendors today are seeing an opportunity to make big profits in software-as-a-service by taking advantage of customer naiveté and simply rebranding older deployment models as SaaS, on-demand, or cloud. These solutions inevitably fail to live up to customer expectations for agility, standardisation, and efficiency. As SaaS continues to increase in popularity across a growing range of application areas, technology buyers (ranging from CIOs to line-of-business [LOB] execs) need to know what differentiates SaaS from application service providing (ASP) and other on-demand implementations cloudwashed with the SaaS term. This report helps you understand the true SaaS characteristics so you can make the right choices for your business.