The key takeaways from Bruce Guptill from Saugatuck Technology on cloud computing event expo today.  He talked about the critical keys to provider selection are viability, support, implementation, knowledge and expertise.  Executives see SaaS delivering significant ability to improve how they manage critical responsibilities.  Provider selection is as important as a solution selection.  This is a very easy and cost efficient way to help your customers.  Your vendor doesn’t have to worry about the support.  The buyer should see all their issues resolved much faster.

Jeff’s approach to the SaaS model is for the data’s security.  You have complete control and flexibility.  SaaS flexibility will be all be due to efficiency.  From the buyer perspective you need to match it to what you need and not have to change what you originally do.  The analytic s and reports are what Plateau Systems works on for their core SaaS customer satisfaction is all about.  They truly believe in customer loyalty and retention in cloud hosting and SaaS.

What will the IT workforce be under the SaaS environment?  YES, new skills are necessary.  You will need to improve and need to advance their skills.  the functional use will not change but using the tools you know and making them workin in different ways will secure your job.  Makinng everything work together will help you.  Not many companies will move everything to the cloud.  There is a hybrid hosting environment.  How do we make everything work together will be the key to cloud computing.  Project management will not change with SaaS.  The end users will need IT help to make this work.  With SaaS you will have more of a standard.

Why should end user care about just SLA’s?  How it’s delivered we don’t care.  SaaS solutions don’t need to maintained by IT.  We now have a standard.  Everything will be single tenancy.  Important to whoever is buying but no one else. How it’s delivered should matter very much.

What’s the uptime for SaaS if you lose the internet?  Nothing you can really do… Offline, you are kinda screwed as of right now.  In the future you will need to address this.  Maybe someday.