Please comment on Software as a Service (current state and future viability).

At the risk of placing myself firmly in the pantheon of IT curmudgeons, I think that SaaS is another new name for an old concept. In 1993, we referred to this sort of thing as an outsourced or hosted application (admittedly not particularly sexy names).  IT lexicon purists may split hairs over the use of a common code base, but fundamentally it’s the same thing.

In my view, SaaS is simply another way to add a particular business capability. There are certain conditions where it makes sense to adopt this approach. For highly differentiated capabilities, it probably isn’t a good option. For more standardized capabilities, it is. Lower investment and speed of implementation are also generally considered as advantages for SaaS solutions.

There are other considerations as well that would be built into a scorecard that would be used to rate the suitability of a SaaS solution versus other options. Again, it’s all about what you are trying to accomplish and what that means about how you should do it.

Obviously, SaaS is and has been a viable option for provisioning capabilities. In the future, my opinion is that it will most likely be subsumed into the larger utility or cloud computing category.