Heath Brownsworth

As software as a service (SaaS) continues to make significant inroads into enterprises and organizations of all shapes and sizes, it seems that there are some technology companies that are not necessarily interested in seeing, or at least accelerating, this trend. Phil Wainwright made an interesting observation in a recent article, The elephants not in the SaaS room, published mid July for the Enterprise Irregulars.  At several recent SaaS oriented trade shows he attended, virtualization giant, VMware, and infrastructure mainstay, Citrix, were no where to be seen.  Even though both of these companies are major cloud players, (cloud being the primary mechanism for delivering SaaS based solutions), their absence at SaaS focused events seems puzzling. At least, at first.

However, as you consider the possible reasons, you quickly arrive at a logical conclusion, SaaS is not in their best interest.  SaaS solutions of all flavors (single tenant, multitenant, hybrid, etc.) seek to achieve administrative efficiencies by maximizing operations at the infrastructure layer.  Granted, SaaS goes well beyond instrastructure efficiencies.  The concept of stacking as many customers onto as little hardware/infrastructure as possible is certainly counter to their revenue model.  Not to just pick on VMware and Citrix, it is certainly easy to identify other technology companies that would not benefit from the proliferation of SaaS. The next time you hear a hard sell for ‘Private Cloud’ or ‘Virtualization’, look around, I’ll bet the elephants are in the room.

Heath-