I’m old enough to remember a time before Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
The year was 2003, and people and organizations purchased software only once. You bought MS Office (or Siebel CRM, the cool CRM at the time) for a high price. Then you hosted it on your personal computer or in a server room. This was called “on-premise” software.
But as my mom always said, “It’s not the buying, it’s the upkeep”.
So an organization would purchase fancy servers and install Siebel CRM locally. Then they would need to periodically maintain those servers and upgrade the software themselves.
Then SAAS came along and offered another option: a significantly lower cost in the form of a monthly subscription, and entirely in the cloud. There’s nothing to maintain yourself.
Salesforce was one of the first to offer this SaaS model, and it wasn’t long before most vendors jumped on that bandwagon.
These days almost everything is a subscription, even things that shouldn’t be.
However with the rise of AI, we are seeing a near return to the on-premise model. We are building and hosting our own software again (albeit in the cloud).
Returning to my mom’s expression: that looks fine for the short term, but what about the long term?
The takeaway
AI can quickly build custom applications. But once built, do you have a plan for maintenance?