Member-only story
SaaS Is Dead.
Long Live SaaS!
Software As a Service (SaaS) is dead. I killed it. I lured it around back of the woodshed and give it the Old Yeller. Why? Because it was time. Let me tell you why.
A Tired Paradigm
SaaS as a concept is a holdover from the transition from discrete desktop application to browser-based applications, a transition that is pretty well over at this point. For those of you too young to remember The Old Times, in order to do almost anything, you used to need to install an application on your local machine, usually some kind of client app that would then connect to a server somewhere. Need to monitor your local network and devices? You’d set up a server with the monitoring software on it, then connect to it from your desktop app to get all the monitoring stats and stuff. Want to manage your EMC SAN? Gotta install a Java client. Even old-school CRMs like Daylight relied on a server and desktop clients. That was the way of things.
There was a shift that started in the 00’s where instead of needing to host everything yourself and access stuff via a local client application, software companies started building their applications as web apps — full applications that could be accessed via a browser that lived somewhere in the cloud. This is the birth of Software As A Service.
