Here are several excerpts from an interview of Lawson Software’s chief executive, Harry Debes, SaaS Industry ‘Will Collapse’ in Two Years:

Lawson Software’s chief executive, Harry Debes, doesn’t believe in software as a service.

In fact, the ERP (enterprise resource planning) software company’s top executive has put a two-year expiry date on software as a service’s (SaaS’s) head.

Q: All the other big players are going on-demand. Is cloud computing the next big thing?

A: This on-demand, SaaS phenomenon is something I’ve lived through three times in my career now. The first time, it was called ’service bureaux’. The second time, it was ‘application service providers’, and now it’s called ‘SaaS’.

But it’s pretty much the same thing, and my prediction is that it’ll go the same way as the other two have gone: nowhere.

SaaS is not God’s gift to the software industry or customer community. The hype is based on one company in the software industry having modest success. Salesforce.com just has average to below-average profitability.

People will realise the hype about SaaS companies has been overblown within the next two years.

Read the rest of this entry »

bookmark to: