There seems to be to be a lot of debate around weather SaaS is all just hype or will displace traditional installed software. I personally think the question should be how long will it take!
16 years ago I was working as a software developer technology company called Pilkington Microelectronics. We had an internet connection! I know that's nothing extraordinary today but in 1993 most people in the UK had never heard of the internet. In fact, I beleive our connection (a dial up modem) was installed by one of the Co-Founders of Demon Internet, the first Internet Service Provider in the United Kingdom for individual subscribers which was sold to Scottish Telecom in 1998 for (UKP) £66M.
One day I tried to look for a flight or a holiday online. I searched in Alta Vista (I think or could have been netscapes own search engine) - this was pre Google. You may find it amazing but I could not find a single airline or travel agent online! The only information I could find was some sort of link to an Apollo gatwway which squirted out scheduled flight times.
Do a search for flights today and you'll find a different story!
So what's this got to do with SaaS or accountancy?
Well - I beleive that the exact same drivers that applied to the airline industry 15 years ago still apply. What the internet did for the airline industry is cut out the desktop software of the travel agent and its processeing and allow them to provide a direct channel to their customers.
Do you really think in 5 years time any of the software vendors are going to want to be putting together download pathces or CD's for the myriads of sofware they produce?
Do you really think that businesses big and small want to carry on paying highly skilled IT staff to keep their own sytems standing still?
Do you really think that in 5 years time accountants are going to want to have every version of Sage installed on a PC somewhere so they can look at their clients accounts?
Do you really think in 5 years time people will still be tied to their office PC to do their work?
Anyone working corporate or public sector organisations today will notice that all of their in-house software is on their intranet - why - because even within an organisation the cost of support of desktop software is just prohibitive.
And that's really what it boils down to. The reason SaaS is here to stay is because it's cheaper. Cheaper for the vendor because they can support it and cheaper for the buyer because they don't have to.
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