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native SaaS products and leaders, such as SuccessFactors and its founder,
Lars Dalgaard, to whom they have entrusted the worldwide responsibility of
their Cloud / SaaS activities.
Service Companies
Every morning, hundreds of thousands of Indian engineers, intelligent, well‐
trained employees of IT services companies such as Accenture or WiPro
push the doors of huge software factories . There, all day long, they will
tinker to modify codes for the specific version of a SAP or Oracle
Applications for a large company in Europe or in the United States.
These ”blue‐collar software engines" are the 21
st
century equivalent, of car
factories of the early 20th century. By 2020, they will have to find another
job because client organizations will have migrated between 50% and 80%
of their applications to SaaS solutions.
After the legacy software publishers, the world of IT services will be the
second market most profoundly impacted by the Cloud Information
Technology Investment Region (ITIR), but why?
SaaS projects induce profound changes in the demand for services:
●
The end of mammoth projects: weeks or months against years, few
people instead of hundreds of developers; compared to a conventional
ERP or CRM project, the costs and average size a project to deploy a SaaS
solution are divided by 10 or more.
●
The end of "endless projects": SaaS project, once launched successfully,
requires virtually no more intervention from services companies, it
works!
●
Fewer IT people, more skills: Organisations will need less "small hands" to
modify an “on‐premise” ERP, work two years to upgrade a CRM or spend
three years to deploy the same application on internal servers in 30
subsidiaries of a large international company. On the other hand, the
demand for specialised skills, able to aggregate SaaS components, ensure
links between Public Cloud solutions and applications still running Private
Clouds will remain very strong. This will be done by a smaller number of
IT specialists, highly skilled and better paid.
