Lawson CEO eats crow and deploys on Amazon
Do you remember this article in 2008 when Lawson CEO Harry Debes made a bold prediction that the SaaS market would collapse in 2 years? He also made some classic quotes that he most likely regrets like these:
ZDNet: Won’t people avoid the mistakes of “previous” SaaS incarnations, as you mentioned?
Debes: People are stupid. History has shown it repeats itself, and people make the same mistakes.Debes: …”Getting signed up as a SaaS customer is fast, but getting out is just as fast. Whereas traditional software is like cocaine–you’re hooked.”
Debes: One day Salesforce.com will not deliver its growth projections, and its stock price will tumble in a big hurry. Then, the rest of the [SaaS] industry will collapse.
That article set the blog-o-sphere on fire for several days and the article on ZDNet had tons of comments, most of them very negative towards Debes.
So today Amazon’s CTO Werner Voguls tweeted this:
Lawson Announces Full-Function ERP on Amazon Web Services Infrastructure
The first thing that came to mind is that they must have a new CEO. So I went to their website and found that Debes is still there. So I read the press release from Lawson’s site and look what they are saying now:
“Commodity software may be good for the vendor but not necessarily the customer”
“This should be great news for CFOs and CIOs who worry about lengthy and complex on-premise installations, the cost and inefficiency of their data centers, the best way to allocate IT staff, and the complexity and difficulty of maintaining software versions and upgrades.”
Wow, what a change of heart! Looks like SaaS is not dead after all. Maybe SaaS is the new cocaine! What I would be interested to know is if Lawson’s move to the cloud was a port of legacy code with some tweaks or did they totally rearchitect their system to take advantage of the AWS. I ask this because I managed a team that maintained Lawson a few years back and its architecture was archaic and outdated at best. I’ll spare you the gory details. The press release did mention the use of S3 so there has to be some changes on the backend.
I would love to see ZDNet reinterview Mr. Debes and see what he thinks about SaaS now. Does the phrase “Eat some crow” sound relevant?
Saas and myths about the economy
I just read an article on Computer World named How SaaS hurts a fragile IT economy. The author claims that the SaaS is actually bad for IT because it reduces jobs and infrastructure purchases. He acknowledges that many fans of SaaS state that it will free up capital to focus resources on other initiatives but he claims most likely it will lead to a reduction in staff. Huh?
When did providing the business with more agility and flexibility while lowering costs become a bad thing? That’s like saying business process automation, MDM, SOA, and all of these technologies and architectures that clean up our years of legacy and make life better for our users are actually causing the demise of IT (as one commenter hints at). I should submit this article to the Fail Blog as failed journalism. Oh, where do I start.
Economics 101
As time progresses, civilization continues to innovate and advance technologies. As technology advancements are made, current processes and technologies gradually become replaced by newer processes (usually through automation) and newer technologies. This creates changes in the workplace where lower technology jobs are eliminated and replaced with newer jobs, often requiring updated skills. No sources to quote here that’s just years of education and common sense talking.
IT Economics 101
There is no other industry that changes faster than IT. People in IT are constantly retooling to keep up with the technological innovations that occur each year. As innovation continues to accelerate, the IT landscape will make significant changes resulting is shifts in supply and demand for the previous jobs and technologies towards newer jobs and technologies. A loss in one area of IT becomes a gain in another although the supply and demand may shift from one company to another.
Lesson in History
A long time ago the railroad industry was king. Eventually, technology advancements in highways, autos, and planes greatly reduced the demand for rail travel. Many people lost their jobs, but brand new industries were born which created millions of new jobs. The problem is that these jobs required different skills than the jobs that they replaced.
The future of IT
So yes, advancements in technology like SaaS will create a shift in the supply and demand of jobs. But IT people are better suited to make the transition than blue collar workers. For IT professionals, it is still about 1’s and 0’s. If an IT person is worth their pay, they should be able to find a new niche to learn to enable them to adapt to the new technologies. All they need is the desire to learn a new skill. After all, most “new” innovations in IT are simply a more refined evolution of ideas from 30-40 years ago. Service Orientation is not new. It has evolved to a more mature state over time. SaaS concepts have been around for years. SaaS is becoming more feasible now due to improvements in bandwidth and infrastructure as well as a host of vendors now providing tools to make SaaS solutions easier to deploy.
Conclusion
SaaS is not bad for the IT economy and IT is not a dying profession! Some of the activities we have been performing for many years have become a commodity, but IT has never been more important to the success of business than it is now. Only those who refuse to learn new skills need to be worried. If you think SaaS is bad for IT, viewing the following slides will probably cause you to shred your computer science diploma. The glass is half full people! Get on board and move your careers forward. After all, the goal of IT is to help the business meet its goals, not retain IT jobs and budgets!
