It is intriguing to me that we have to have this conversation about SaaS and software updates yet again. There is supposed to be a balancing act between the desire of investors, efficiency for the org and the needs of the customer. Right now, that balance is (yet again) all out of whack.
I actually got to thinking about this doing work for my non-IT company. One day, I realized that between browser, OS and office solutions, we were updating and restarting something nearly every night. Then, we were forced to upgrade our accounting to a really great SaaS product. Considering that a product that has served both of my businesses so well for a decade will soon be replaced in our environments, apparently, it is excellent for investors’ mindset, not so much for customers. Oh, it’s easier to access, but it comes with a separate set of weaknesses that would cost my less profitable business a ton of money. Since I like to keep the solutions standardized between the companies (for the accountant, if nothing else), the SaaS product will have to go at both orgs. We reverted to their discontinued local install product until evaluations were done to replace it entirely.
The problem is that both SaaS and rapid iteration are great on paper, but like just about every good idea in IT, they are being treated like a panacea. Sure, recurring revenue from SaaS is great. But if you lose customers doing it, that may not work as well. The same is true with rapid iterations—once you get to consumers, updating even weekly is a bit of crazy-town. Most end customers look for a way to turn off updates as soon as they notice the pattern. Business users aren’t much better, we all have stories of systems or hardware that weren’t updated for years. Heck, I worked on teams that hadn’t updated their own systems to get them off of outdated OSes and hardware, let alone kept on top of vendor updates. This is part of the reason for the drive to SaaS – to force upgrades. But if frequent updates introduce errors for the customer, well, it’s a lousy reason.
Make your products good, and make certain you are serving the broadest piece of the market that makes sense. Of course, follow trends and make sure you are still doing what makes sense. But what makes sense is what serves the market and/or the organization’s bottom line. Everything else is input. Some will say, “In good SaaS, the user never knows if there is an issue.” Yeah, and I never wrote a bug. Seriously, don’t force things on customers; give them what they need, where they need it. In one (security) space I cover, my regular advice to vendors is, “Users need this one bit of functionality behind the firewall and stable. Give it to them, SaaS or not, or lose them.” But that sentiment is increasingly being applied outside security. Users want vendors and products to do for them, not to them.
In short, do what you like to see from your vendors. The convenience of a SaaS accessible from anywhere and free of capital expense is huge, but it isn’t always the deciding factor and, in many spaces, limits market appeal. You all know what is useful, and you know for a given toolset what is not. Apply that mentality to your own customers. And keep rocking it. Sooner or later, this deployment octopus we’ve created will come together, and we’ll have different problems to fix.
