VideoJohn Edwards, CFO Magazine
September 1, 2007
- Not the best examples to judge an entire industry...
"Covalent has since switched to an onsite application from SugarCRM"
SugarCRM is an open source SFA application...so Covalent's failure to integrate represents their own internal failure, not Sugar's. This particular example is a better reason to go with a CRM vendor that has an experienced (and in-house) Professional Implementation department.
"In December 2005, Salesforce.com suffered an hours-long service outage, and has reportedly suffered several minor outaes since then, as have some other SaaS providers."
Hours long? Over an entire year? Just hours? that's it? How many hours (days?) by how many customers have been lost (but not hit the front page news) from on-premise systems that go down, but its left up to internal IT resources to fix?
"Moreover, in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, on-demand ERP specialist NetSuite noted that the company does not maintain an offsite backup for either its own apps or customer data."
This is simply not true. Dare I say an outright lie? NetSuite has a single data center that is backed up on a regular basis. Salesforce.com also had a single data center when they went public in 2004.
I find none of your points compelling or well thought out.Posted by Jon Burke | Feb 25, 2008 1:28 PM ET
- Not all garden snakes are serpents
Hi John -- Thanks for mentioning LucidEra in your article. In the face of a lot of positive momentum behind Software-as-a-Service solutions, I appreciate the need to show the potential drawbacks. But, many of the drawbacks mentioned in this article need to be put in perspective. I've written up more detailed comments on the points raised in this article at http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2007/09/27/being-contrary-to-the-contrarian/, but my quick summary is that it's always possible to find customers that don't like a particular model. They key question is to ask whether their experience is typical, or whether it's the outlier. In my experience, negative SaaS experiences are the outlier.
Posted by Ken Rudin | Sep 27, 2007 8:36 PM ET
- Great Points!
Well said! The benefits of SaaS definitely come with risks. As long as people manage them properly, the "free lunch" of SaaS will come with a far lower cost than if companies buy the marketing hype. Here's another article that talks about how to manage the risks associated with SaaS -http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/9678354
Posted by John Myers | Sep 13, 2007 1:40 AM ET
