Published on the 02/08/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson

‘100 percent’ of companies moving to Software as a Service is far from a sure thing…

That’s according to a local industry veteran who provides an alternate view to the one taken by Steve Miranda, Oracle’s head of application development.

In a comment on last week’s story, John Blackham, CEO of XSOL, said for starters, SaaS and on premise software are fundamentally the same. “Both can be ‘highly modular’.  This was the aim of ERP companies way before SaaS was [even] heard of.”

Demonstrating his tenure in the industry, Blackham stirs up ghosts of bygone eras. “Remember OO [object oriented] and products such as Protean from Marcam, or JDE’s OneWorld. Both promised an end to customisation.  Both were wrong, both companies died as a result, and in JDE’s case ended up inside Oracle [acquired 2005, when Oracle went on its ERP spending spree which included the purchase of PeopleSoft].”

Where Miranda posited that the vaunted flexibility and standardisation of SaaS applications supports innovation – something we questioned – Blackham has a very different view. “In fact, the exact opposite of Mr. Miranda’s claim is true. SaaS kills innovation, unless you think that every user having access to exactly the same software features give any company a competitive advantage,” he wrote.

“As Gartner said in 2009, until SaaS, specifically multi-tenant, can offer customisation that will support any business requirement, it is a non-starter for serious businesses.”

Contacted for further comment, Blackham confirmed his view that if everyone has same thing, there is no advantage to be had. But, he added, that is only half the story. “Do you innovate, or does the software? Software doesn’t innovate, people do. And another thing, with the rate of change, can my innovation really wait for a brand of software? If so, it is not going to happen.”

Real flexibility which could support innovation, said Blackham, is more likely to come from software like the humble spreadsheet (which has its own well-documented limitations). “With spreadsheets, you can make them do things you want them to do. That’s what Protean was trying to achieve in the 90s. It was effectively built on a spreadsheet basis, with these huge layers of interconnected spreadsheets. The problem there was that you didn’t have foggiest idea where you were in that maze of pages.”

Blackham noted that the tech industry can be very ‘Groundhog Day’ for veterans. “Just look at automation. There’s a big story in the Herald’s business section about robots taking jobs. I mean, if we can’t get Novopay to work, just how exactly do you suppose we’re going to automate all the jobs away? It’s overhyped; as early as the 1940s and again in a big way in the 1980s we had this sort of scaremongering.”

He agreed that in any event, if or when increased technological automation happens, jobs don’t disappear, they change. That’s been demonstrated throughout history, with Arkwright’s stocking frame an early case in point.

There’s even a chuckle to be had over big data, Blackham added. “’We must do something with all this data’ is a recurring theme every 20 years. It used to be megabytes in 1993 or 1994, and how on earth were we going to quickly analyse this data. Now we’re thinking in gigabytes or petabytes – like many others, this particular chestnut is being re-roasted.”