Charles Smith

London UK

Consultant

SaaS will prove expensive for companies as the real total cost of multiple rented applications and storage per user becomes realised. The problem will be that as with outsourcing the client companies will lose their skilled IT Staff as a side effect of "cost savings".
The CTO should be very careful in the construction of any internal price list used to price the provision of services for his users. It is very easy to miss hidden services provided by in-house IT staff. Those hidden services can be very expensive to provide using a third party.
To give just one example SaaS increases the dependency on network bandwidth and increases sensitivity to wide area network latency. Fixing those problems adds to the overall bill for SaaS.
I’m not against SaaS, in fact I use it extensively in my own company, but it needs careful thought and pilot running before wholesale commitment.