Why SaaS Sucks

• Citations from "Jul 27, 2015, Apurva Dave":

Yeah, I just said that. If you’re building a new software product today, you’re pretty much expected to be building a SaaS application. When we started building Jut it seemed like a no-brainer to me that we’d end up with your typical multi-tenant SaaS environment.

Five Reasons Why Traditional SaaS Can Suck

Working with dozens of potential customers, we realized that there were a number of limiting factors in using a SaaS model for the delivery of heavyweight data applications:

• The lock-and-key effect: The most common concern about SaaS is data security, especially for analytics applications. User information, customer data, and other sensitive information may limit your willingness to send data elsewhere.

• The traffic jam: Sending gigs of data “off-site” – even if it’s from your AWS setup to someone else’s – is pretty intensive on the network and could end up costing you bucks.

• The tragedy of success: As a provider tries to scale up, they inevitably run into challenges around trying to manage the right amount of compute based on customer size and the complexity of analytics being calculated. This might sound like “it’s the vendor’s problem” but it certainly becomes your problem if you’ve done the work to integrate with the vendor, but as you scale up performance is a dog. You can’t just turn around and start using another vendor tomorrow.

• The “resell Amazon” effect: for most cloud companies starting up today, they’re building on AWS (or maybe Google). If you’re building an analytics system, you’re likely going to be heavy on both compute and storage. And what you basically have to do is mark up the cost of AWS to pass it along to customers. That really doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially when many of your customers might actually get a better AWS deal than you do.

• Your friendly neighborhood government: Regulations may simply prohibit you from sending your data to another vendor, unless you are guaranteed that the vendor keeps data local to you (or your end customer) and provides certain security measures. This becomes an ongoing burden for you if you continually have to police your vendor with regulatory changes.

So... if you’re worried about cost, speed, performance, OR security... SaaS can really suck.

Source: "Why SaaS Sucks // Apurva Dave" ...

2016-05-10 09-29