A key question for the both the Software-as-a-Service and Cloud Computing Marketplace is when will big business adopt either of these approaches.  The answer, Now, Later and Never.

The IT shops inside of large businesses face many hurdles.  Unfortunately, in many large corporate IT environments, IT managers are not awarded for innovation, but rather for maintaining a status quo.  The risks are just too high to allow for dramatic experiments of even smaller changes.  Let me explain.Image you are an IT manager responsible for keeping a global ERP environment up and running.  As long the instance is available at reasonable performance, everyone is happy.  Unfortunately, no one sees the work around keeping the instance up.  Redundancy, firewall and load balance management, regular maintenance, patch application, back-up, etc.  Lots of moving pieces.  All they see is are my workers able to work.Now, let’s talk about moving pieces of this either into the cloud or supplementing with a SaaS application.  Now you are introducing change.  This requires new processes, new skills, some configuration changes.  All for what?  In the end, the end user doesn’t see a big change initially, and you’ve introduced a large amount of risk.  If the ERP system goes offline, the CFO is likely to know about it soon.  Why bother, as the immediate benefit just doesn’t outweigh the risk.

 But, the SaaS and Cloud Computing models have so many actual benefits, that big companies will begin to adopt these models.  They just won’t swap out legacy or existing applications.  They start with low visibility, lower priority, less mission critical applications.  Only after they see the big benefits of the SaaS model in terms of reduced implementation, maintenance and capital costs, will they start to look to legacy application upgrades to move into the SaaS model.