In my travels I am regularly explaining SaaS concepts and ideas to business (aka “Real” people), but needing to convince the CIO, CTO or other senior technology person.

This is a tricky position to be in as often they (a) hold the keys to the system and (b) come from a background where the thought of letting someone else store the organisations data would be the scariest idea they can imagine. That said, reactions generally take one of two forms, negative and positive.

Negative and Angry

If we move to a SaaS model, what the **** am I going to do? – you are taking my job away!

Positive and Grateful

Oh Thank god – at last!

To make no bones about it, the guys in the first group DO have a point. One of the reasons for doing this at all is to move to a cheaper cost model. One of the ways of doing that is reducing the number of support people you need, as you no longer need to run some of your servers, clients, storage and other assorted boxes and wires required to keep the organisational lights on.

The catch is however, that those people in the first group with the initial negative reaction, often BECOME the people in the positive group, when they realise that this is an opportunity rather than a burden.

I believe, deep in their soul, no-one ever grows up wanting to run an email server for example, yet in organisations all round the world, there are millions of people all doing exactly the same thing.  Given the chance of that, or doing something that makes a quantifiable difference to the business, its not often hard to make the choice.

Most of the traditional arguments against are quickly disappearing. Bandwidth is getting bigger, storage is becoming cheaper, the support models from the SaaS providers are maturing and the question is changing from “Why would we?”, to “Why wouldn’t we?”

Now – In house IT can move to doing what it should do – Providing the systems and expertise that make your business or offering unique and differentiated.

Tags: infrastructure, saas

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