SaaS to the max: The limits of shifting from on-site to cloud services
Everything old is new again. Software as a Service (SaaS) may seem like a recent innovation, but the basic concept stretches back half-a-century to IBM's mainframe timesharing of the 1960s. Even its most current incarnation pre-dates the "cloud computing" phenomenon by nearly half a decade.
SaaS supplanted the software-retail model by hosting distributed software as well the company's own data in the cloud, accessible via a Web browser. Enterprises pay for services, not software. After 16 years of SaaS, some companies have moved almost all their functions into the cloud, from enterprise software to productivity packages to telephony. According to IT research company Gartner, cloud office systems—like Office 365 and Google Apps—will achieve 60 percent total market penetration by 2018.
Despite that prediction, the majority of companies still maintain a significant portion of their software on site. Companies do this for a variety of reasons, including security and compliance concerns and the initial and long term costs of switching from software licenses they already own to a pay-as you go model. But there are also many cases in which companies suffer from decision inertia.
