Came across a blog post by a gentleman from Microsoft (and I have somehow lost the link, mea culpa, mea culpa) that took issue with software as a service, SaaS, because the author thinks that the user interface is too slow. I respectfully disagree with the gentleman. First the UI is sufficient and improving all the time. In fact NetSuite has just adopted AJAX for its UI and the results have been very impressive, you can read about it here. I've worked on a lot of in-house client server systems over the years and NetSuite clicks along just as well as they ever did. It's speed may not be good enough for an Army unit on the front lines, and that's understandable. But for business process transactions and reporting I see no issues. In fact, I have been around long enough to know that it was just a few short years ago that client-server itself was taking a lot of heat for its UI. You'll recall that until that time we had dumb terminals with black screens, or PCs with terminal emulation, that were, since the data stream was so light, fast as hell. Client server took a big hit in the user community because, with its richer graphics and data stream, it simply could not match the speed of terminals. So yes, some small, yet still significant, amount of time was lost with client server systems. However, at the end of the day, improvements to the UI and the quality of the data stream, made client server very attractive and the user community, as well as decision makers, were won over. Similarly, the SaaS UI continues to improve and the fact that SaaS model provides such a better computing environment for users will eventually win them over. For example, in house systems are notorious for crashing and needing maintenance, both of which eat into the user's day, meaning that they have to catch up today tomorrow. The SaaS model forces the vendor to offer phenomenal uptime guarantees, NetSuite offers 99.5% or one month free, because their life depends on it. If you were a user, would you trade 1000 seconds in transaction processing time for 2 hours of system downtime? Exactly. And in the same vein, the SaaS model enables more users to access the system. So sales, direct or partner, keys the order at the point of sale. If you were an end user in the front office, would you trade a 1000 seconds of additional transaction processing time for sales orders that do not require the duplicate effort of re-keying. Right again. SaaS will continue to improve the UI, and in the meantime, take a look benefits of the model as a whole. They are significant. |
