Look at how IPIX going out of business caused panoramas on thousands of websites to stop working. What if you used Flickr to share images between 500 employees when Yahoo logins became compulsory? Does that update to the online word processor break your templates? What are the business impacts of any, all, or various combinations of the local or SaaS systems failing? How can you audit the systems of your SaaS providers to pass your own ISO9001 (and other) accreditation?

With your own systems, you plonk one server centre here, and you plonk another one somewhere else. Whap in a bunch of fibres, throw in some failover, and even that simplest of beginnings has certain basic guarantees that are axiomatic. You can verify the backup procedures. You can test upgrades for your combination of packages.

So what's my motivation in writing this? I want something more interesting as the next fad. Something good that has a chance of working. Don't bore me with another tragic mistake like Java.

Steve.

(*) The One True Editor is joe!

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Bill asked for a reaction provoking rant, so here's one!

SaaS, the latest religion

First up, I'm a hardware sort of guy. I take requirements and convert them to software, servers and networks. I worked in Defence and now run my own company.

Much like Xtreme Programming and other religions, an ecosystem of ideas can be self-referential enough to create a consistent worldview. If only other people would do this, everything would work properly! In the longer term, nature cannot be fooled and debates are settled by practical realities. Think of the old battles that have been fought, which are irrelevant these days.

The trick is to work out which of the new ideas will stay around like emacs vs vi (*), or disappear like Cobol vs Fortran. If you remember a few years back, outsourcing was all the rage. Now companies are quietly hiring people back, with overseas staff being made into regional offices. Multi-national corporations operate a lot slower than smaller companies, and outsourcing was the equivalent of splitting the local office across several timezones.

The idea this time around is to centralise the software instead of the systems. The people who write the software are the people who maintain the servers that run the software. Instead of a local LAN to the server room, the Internet provides the connectivity instead. It sounds like a new approach that could work, so why not!

At least, that'd be what you'd say if you're selling SaaS to a customer. In the few years before SaaS becomes another failed silver bullet, it could be a pig's trough for all the consultants and experts and authors and journalists who rake up the buzzword bingo higher and higher until the house of cards falls and the next fad comes along.

(continued next post)

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