GUEST-BLOG: Summits Aren’t Always the Peak, and the New Doesn’t Always Fully Displace the Old

By Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal, Beagle Research Group. After a few months of vendor meetings for the analyst community in which each took us to the mountaintop to survey — via PowerPoint — their future visions for the valley below, I am almost all summitted out. The religious reference struck me yesterday at SAP’s, very good, analyst summit in Boston because, like some religious conversions, there seems to be a necessary pain component intended to make the conversion stick. In most analyst summit meetings the pain comes from sitting still for many hours of the aforementioned PowerPoint presentations. The biggest impression I came away with was intramural since, having been to Oracle OpenWorld and Dreamforce, I'm in a mood to compare, contrast, synthesize, and perhaps even prescribe. SaaS computing has won the battle, maybe even the war, but the victory is not enough to secure a homogeneous peace. Translation: SaaS is important and the future of software, but there are multiple reasons why it will not reign supreme, not for a while at least. There are still some 6,600 mainframe computers not only in existence but in use and it will be some time before the population dwindles to the point that, like the B-24, there is a small handful of them capable of doing what they do. The same is likely for premises-based enterprise software. It’s not that on-demand technologies can’t do everything that the premise-based products can, rather it is that the premise-based solution vendors have examined alternatives and decided that retrofitting their wares with some of the best benefits of SaaS is enough for the moment. It is also because customers of some application types are not ecstatic about sending their applications to the cloud. We’ve achieved a kind of status quo between premises-based solutions and the cloud. The frontier will keep moving to the clouds but there is life in the old paradigm. And I suspect this will be a good thing as we turn some of our attention from software wars to the substantive questions of how we do business after the bubble and its burst, as liquidity remains a serious challenge and, in the wake of Copenhagen, in a world more acutely conscious of sustainability.