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The Reality of SaaS & the Delusion of Software Ownership

You can’t buy software like a press. It must keep moving with the technology infrastructure, the market, and your business. SaaS is a subscription model that better matches the reality of the way you need software to keep evolving.

Wednesday, November 09, 2022

The business model of software has been migrating from perpetual license to software-as-a-service (SaaS) for the last decade or more. Initially, SaaS was not well accepted in the print industry. I think the reason behind the slow adoption of SaaS was because the perpetual software license was more like the purchasing model of buying a press. You financed the investment. You thought of it as ownership. You expected to have it for a long time.

Software is not like a press. At the closing quarter of 2022 the idea of “owning software” seems funny to me. What’s so funny about owning software? You can’t buy software and then disconnect from the vendor who made it. A software purchase is more like a ticket to ride a train. You are agreeing to take a journey with the software vendor. The reason I use the train/journey metaphor is because software must keep changing to keep up with the changing infrastructure it resides on (the tracks).

If your software is client-server, the software must move in response to new hardware, new networking technology, new operating systems, new hosting strategies (e.g., virtualization). If your software is cloud- and browser-based, then it must move in response to browser versions, security, networking changes, etc. 


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About Jennifer Matt

Jennifer Matt is the managing editor of WhatTheyThink’s Print Software section as well as President of Web2Print Experts, Inc. a technology-independent print software consulting firm helping printers with web-to-print and print MIS solutions.

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