As we look forward to 2010 many are asking how the last 18 months of recession will shape the events of the new year. For many companies, the recession has brought with it severe cost cutting and a detailed re-examination of current IT investments and practices.
Jim Hayes, director of Accenture’s Oracle practice, said that “the kind of disruptions that we’ve seen have been painful,certainly on one level, but maybe therapeutic, on another level, because it makes us rethink things.”
Part of the re-examination that is going on is looking at costs to evaluate the ROI on investments. “Internet Time” has grown beyond just for the internet. The new clock where change happens rapidly is being adopted by all sorts of businesses.
As companies soul search about how to adjust to the realities of rapid change and reduced budgets, fundamental assumptions about their ways of doing business are being questioned. Costly monolithic relationships with vendor giants like Oracle and SAP may not be the engine of business agility that companies are looking for now. Enterprise solutions can consume huge amounts of dollars and resources, but more adversely, can take years to implement, deploy and debug, only to be outdated by the time they go live.
Companies are considering smaller vendors and new technologies. One technology that is bringing about change is SaaS, which as-of-late has become bundled into what is known as Cloud Computing. The success of SaaS over the last 18 months has opened the eyes of many companies. SaaS has flipped upside down pricing models, software delivery and approaches towards maintenance and integrations.
Most analysts are bullish about the future of Cloud Computing and SaaS. IDC predicts that it will grow from $17 billion in 2009 to $44 billion in 2013. Saugatuck Technology predicts that the market uptake of Cloud Computing will see a few more years of slow cautious adoption, but by 2014, “SaaS will become integral to infrastructure, business systems, operations and development within all aspects of user firms, with variations in status and roles based on region and business culture.”
So, while 2010 may not be the year for SaaS/Cloud Computing, it will be a year in which we can expect its acceptance to continually grow.
