It’s been a while since the last update, so let’s take a look at what’s going on around the web in SaaS For IT Management:
Phil Wainewright has an article entitled “Why freemium is bad for business” that brings up some interesting problems with using free SaaS services in businesses:
It means vendors don’t invest in proper access controls. Most low-end free services target individuals (’consumers’) and so they’re built around giving access to a single user. If you’re a business, you’ll probably want more than one user to have access to the same account, but that sort of access control infrastructure is expensive to set up and manage, so free services won’t support it. That’s fine if you can start off free and then migrate to a paid version when you need more access control, but many freemium vendors don’t offer that option.
and
It means vendors don’t invest in instrumentation. If there’s no fee, there’s little incentive to monitor usage patterns and service levels. Again, the infrastructure for this kind of capability is expensive, and if a vendor is focused on the kind of mass market that a free product has to appeal to, it’s unlikely to want to spend money on features such as SLA monitoring, uptime dashboards, real-time user support or detailed usage pattern analysis. This limits its ability to offer differentiated services that performance-sensitive business customers will pay good money for, forcing it to focus even more on volume rather than quality.
Over at 16 Ventures, author Lincoln Murphy spends 23 pages railing on freemium in SaaS. The guy really doesn’t like freemium.
Another one from Phil Wainewright- he’s got an interview with Jeff Kaplan about “some of the ways enterprises will deal with hybrid environments that mix on-premise and cloud assets.” It’s done as a podcast or a blog transcript.
Daniel Druker has a post giving a “2010 Forecast: Cloudy With Lots Of Sun:”
This has been quite the week for financial results and predictions for the cloud computing and software market.
- Gartner Group predicts 17% growth for cloud computing and SaaS firms vs. 4.8% for on-premises software for 2010.
- Forrester Research says “The technology downturn of 2008 and 2009 is unofficially over” and points to growth in cloud computing in 2010.
- Bruce Richardson of AMR says “If you had listened to me and invested in SaaS stocks in December 2008, your portfolio would be up 300% to 400% by now.
- And closest to home, Intacct announces 80% growth and the second best quarter in the company’s history – and that’s quarter over quarter increased growth for an already fast-growing company.
