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Thank god for analysts like Phil Wainewright to articulate the benefits of SaaS. Recently, I came across an article by Phil, in which he writes about a report "August 2009 Forrester Wave for Collaboration Platforms", which is a report by research company Forrester, comparing collaboration platforms on 66 criteria. According to Phil, such reports reflect a covert analyst bias towards SaaS companies. One of the criteria in the report is "cross platform compatibility" on which SaaS companies have been ranked low, since they cannot be installed on different platforms. This is ironical, since the reason that SaaS solutions cannot be installed on multiple platforms is that they dont need to be installed on any platform. SaaS solutions can be used and operated from the web browser, irrespective of platform, no matter whether it is Windows, Mac, Linux or even mobile platforms. Phil has cited the periodicity of these reports as a further instance of covert bias. These reports usually come in about two years, which reflects the upgrade cycle on on premise products. As far as SaaS solutions are concerned, they are upgraded on an ongoing basis, and may have been upgraded 7-8 times by the time the next report comes out. Very compelling arguments. What do you think?
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