Business Technology Roundtable

I was interviewed today by a journalist from one of the CIO-oriented pubs who surprised me by asking a series of questions which came back to many of the same fundamental misconceptions about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) which I thought I had dispelled in a BusinessWeek commentary I published in 2006. The first misconception the journalist had was that SaaS solutions are not robust enough to satisfy large-scale enterprises, as well as small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs). I pointed out to him that large-scale enterprises have been leveraging SaaS solutions for a long time, but have only recently begun to talk about their successful experiences. One of the most recent announcements of a major deployment of SaaS by a large-scale enterprises was by Flextronics who is adopting Workday's on-demand human resource management (HRM) solution to support its 200,000 employees. Real Total Cost of Ownership The second misconception the journalist revealed was the old "buy vs. lease...