Are all SaaS equal?

Part 1 of 2. (read part 2 here)

Short answer: No. The long answer is a bit more complicated. In the general software business SaaS is perceived to be a "problem free" subscription of a pice of software. In the ERP business i feel that the major vendors has succeeded in diluting and almost destroying the concept.

Let's take some positive examples first. I use two pieces of software daily at work. Office 365 and PipeDrive CRM. I like both of them alot. And from a user and owner perspective they act like a true SaaS concept. Things get updated, I get a notice of changes and new functionality, and I usually don't need to take any action. This is the way I expect SaaS subscriptions to work and this the concept was presented.

The adaptation on certain types of software and the expectations in the market has grown faster than I think many of us thought. It hasn't been too long from "cloud is dangerous" too "cloud first" or "cloud always". I think these expectations have frightened some of the software vendors and forced them to package and promote software in a new way even if the software itself wasn't ready for it. And this is the reason I mean that the concept has been willfully destroyed for ERP.

I will try to not make this article a deep technical discussion but I will present some cases and my personal opinion on them. And this is not an attack on the quality of the software I discuss, it's a (mild?) attack on one of their value propositions.

One of the first problems with the Cloud and SaaS concept is that people mix the software service with the infrastructure. Cloud or not. Hosting and platform services on their own is not important for the software service. So let's rip them apart. For almost all mainstream software needs you really should not have to care if it's hosted in Azure, AWS, Google or something else. Yes they are different. But for most services they all can provide what you need. When you buy SaaS you find the software service you need and you pay for that. You should not have to bother to even find out where it's hosted. (Liablility, contracts etc should of course be transparent and cover the business's need for protection and legal rights).

A good example of this is DropBox's move from AWS to their own hosting service. From an end user perspective it's irrelevant. Albeit from a technology and business case perspective it's of course very interesting. My point is: The hosting and technology choices are, and should always be, DropBox's concern. Not their end-user's.

Salesforce is another good example. They actively encourage their clients to don't build their applications around specific data center needs. And they list their hosting sites openly.

Finally. Of course there are some businesses that have concrete needs regarding data-storage, local requirements etc. There can be different reasons for that. Military customers, governmental etc. But these are mainly infrastructure questions and should very rarely inflict on actual Software choices.

(In the next part of this article I will dig a bit more into the ERP side of all this).