Churchill Club proudly hosted SAP Founder Hasso Plattner and Salesforce CEO Marc Russell Benioff about a week and a half ago moderated by Quentin Hardy from Fortune Magazine.
The SaaS model (Software as a Service) model was going to be the focus of the attention here and it was a great match on stage.
Marc appears to be a very typical and smooth CEO who seems to impress upon his audiences the urgency of his ideas. Hasso was always going to be on the defensive just because SaaS is the new and exciting thing challenging what appears to be status quo.
During the conversation, Hasso did make some excellent points though.
1. There are big customers with big liabilities and big volumes who will continue to have trouble with SaaS of reliability and security. They will always be much more comfortable having in house software.
2. SAP realizes the importance of the Market movement towards SaaS and the Business by Design effort is in that vein.
3. Continuous improvements in the infrastructure will be key for SaaS' success.
Marc was passionate about his opinions which he outlined very succinctly:
1. SaaS is not the future. SaaS is the present
2. Organizations that don't adapt as quickly as possible to this model will find their ROIs diminishing against their competitors who will change their outlook.
Both Marc and Hasso took some potshots at each other but were very congeniel for the most part throughout the conversation. Apparently Marc had never met Hasso before and this was his first meeting with him. One of the better questions from the audience was about what did they admire about the other and Marc cited Tenure in market while Hasso referred to the model and execution that is employed by Salesforce.com as the features that they admired about the other.
The funny thing was that The Great Debate did not turn out to be much of a debate in light of the fact that both agreed with the premise that SaaS is here to stay. They seem to differ only on the impact as of that day and while Hasso felt that it will take some time and some form of hybrid model to make things work for SaaS, Marc seemed to disagree and felt that SaaS was proven and ready to go, in fact was already going strong.
Some forecasting seems to indicate that SaaS will be the majority of Software deployment model by 2013. Something to ponder about in times to come!
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