Software as a Service Underwhelming

A new Gartner Survey in Britain has found the users of SAAS to be less than impressed with their service. Although SAAS has become a common strategic tool, the concerns expressed by those surveyed need to be addressed. A major concern involved service. Respondents said that the service needs to be 24/7 and readily accessible. This seems pretty basic.

Another concern related to costs, which is more complex. Any move to SAAS, especially involving critical functions, by a company is bound to be difficult and potentially expensive. It is often a major system change, and this involves process changes, which involves how people do their jobs, which is always a difficult area within which to achieve change.

Some of the executives said tha transition took longer than they thought it would. However, this is a common complaint of executives when technology changes are made. We heard it for years with ERP implementations. Many SAAS implementations are no less signficant.

SAAS in some form, along with Cloud based systems, will remain a permanent part of the typical architecture, and the users and the vendors need to work together to make it better.

An article on the Gartner Survey is found on the CIO site.