Comments on: Should IT professionals be worried about SaaS? http://blog.coda2go.com/2008/01/10/should-it-professionals-be-worried-about-saas/ Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:18:32 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 By: Peter Coffee, salesforce.com http://blog.coda2go.com/2008/01/10/should-it-professionals-be-worried-about-saas/#comment-8 Peter Coffee, salesforce.com Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:11:16 +0000 http://blog.coda2go.com/professionals/2008/01/16/should-it-professionals-be-worried-about-saas/#comment-8 Gartner data show the typical IT budget being dominated (from typically 80% to as much as 98%) by the costs of merely maintaining capability in place. Software as a Service eliminates or greatly reduces many of those maintenance costs: if that maintenance component of the IT budget were only reduced by, say, 15%, that could easily double the funds available for innovative projects with no increase in overall IT spending. Add to this the potential of Platform as a Service to accelerate new projects' deployments, and essentially eliminate their up-front capital investment and technical risk: the result is that the IT staff can suddenly look like rock-star contributors to competitiveness. SaaS/PaaS doesn't come to displace the IT department, but to promote it to more interesting work. Gartner data show the typical IT budget being dominated (from typically 80% to as much as 98%) by the costs of merely maintaining capability in place. Software as a Service eliminates or greatly reduces many of those maintenance costs: if that maintenance component of the IT budget were only reduced by, say, 15%, that could easily double the funds available for innovative projects with no increase in overall IT spending.

Add to this the potential of Platform as a Service to accelerate new projects’ deployments, and essentially eliminate their up-front capital investment and technical risk: the result is that the IT staff can suddenly look like rock-star contributors to competitiveness. SaaS/PaaS doesn’t come to displace the IT department, but to promote it to more interesting work.

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