The first session on Wednesday was delivered by Bill McNee, founder of Saugatuck Technology and formerly of Gartner. Being an analyst, his session was focused largely on providing research data related to the topic of SaaS and cloud computing, and it delivered a pretty complex look into the feelings (and purchase decision making) of business customers, the nature of SaaS and cloud products, and their prospects, both immediate and long-term.
The session was titled, “Blue Skies? Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing and SaaS,” dealing, obviously, with the hot topic of the entire Parallels Summit – cloud computing.
It’s a pretty nebulous term, in that it’s an extremely popular buzzword and everybody seems to define it differently.
Emerging consumption and delivery model for it based services in which the user only sees the services and has no need to know anything about the technology or implementation. (this is from IBM’s internal language defining cloud computing).
McNee contends that cloud computing is an evolution beyond SaaS, following three “waves” of SaaS that reach an ubiquitous adoption before businesses begin to adopt cloud computing, which he describes as “measured, monitored, managed business processes.” By 2012, he says, cloud computing will capture at least twenty five percent of IT spending growth.
Just to be perfectly clear: we are, in McNee’s opinion, in just the very early stages of cloud computing adoption.
One of Saugatuck’s key findings related to SaaS and cloud computing is that despite the economic environment, purchase plans for SaaS and cloud computing remain strong in 2009 and 2010.
His data shows that key drivers for SaaS purchases are cost, support and speed, whereas relationship with the implementer and the pricing models are right at the bottom, which interestingly may indicate a decreasing influence of brand loyalty in that part of the IT market.
The top SaaS solutions as of right now is a bit of a mixed bag, depending on the size of the customer, though collaboration is well represented. Through 2011, however, collaboration is the number one app, along with things like customer service and finance and accounting for smaller companies and HR and benefits for the larger customers.
One of the more interesting bits of data he presented was a chart showing the uptake of SaaS for core applications catching up to the adoption of the more broad and popular solutions among the larger “enterprise” type customers.
A couple of great slides – one showing Saugatuck’s estimation of the layers of cloud computing, and and its “…-as-a-service Taxonomy,” which labels applications described as things like “infrastructure as a service,” “platform as a service” “software as a service” and so on. There was a lot of info on these slides, and more than I can reasonably relate here, but he did say he’d make the slides available later – more than likely through the Parallels Summit site. These are definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in a kind of big-picture look at the entire structure of the market for service offerings.
Bottom line: what McNee’s offering here is a look into the prospects for adoption of this kind of technology. He concluded with a list of “strategic planning positions.” It was a lot of projections, but for the most part, he indicated that SaaS adoption is on the way up, a combination of public and private cloud solutions, and that companies out to buy or build them aren’t necessarily capable of taking advantage of all the cost savings associated with the technology.
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