How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products • Hacker News Board

Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#61

Post by Jonovono » Tue, Dec 02, 2014, 5:16 PM UTC

rlpb wrote: post #53

Jonovono wrote: post #10

Interesting. Cheaper than the salary for an employee and probably together are able to help you do more than a single person.

> Cheaper than the salary for an employee... True, but I wonder how much of an employee's time it takes to manage dealing with all these suppliers, technology integration time with each of them, and changing how these services are used each time a supplier changes its product offering.

So you're saying we need a SaaS service for managing other SaaS services and integrating them and keeping up to date with changes! :p

actually....

Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#62

Post by roel_v » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 12:53 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #42

corkill wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't trying to reduce costs, they are trying to focus on their product and growing their company.

That's fine so long as the money flows nice, but if/when things get tougher, they will have to scramble to find a solution. There's 2 sides to this business -- the technical/development side, and the business side. The business side should very much care about not wasting money unnecessarily, even during the good times. ~~~~~~~ But it's not just about saving money -- the company has almost zero flexibility when using…

"The business side should very much care about not wasting money unnecessarily, even during the good times."

How many businesses have you run?

Re: How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products

#63

Post by eitally » Fri, Dec 05, 2014, 3:09 PM UTC

berkay wrote: post #58

_delirium wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also considerable risk-aversion at large enterprises. Getting themselves into a position of significant dependence on a SaaS provider can be unappealing for at least two reasons, even if the pricing works for them initially: 1. risk that the pricing gets raised significantly, or the business's employee/customer profile changes in a way that raises the price to them significantly; or 2. risk that the SaaS prov…

It doesn't work that way in practice. I've been to more than one enterprise where an in-house developed application was no longer maintained, original developers were not available, and no one knew how the application even worked. There are very high risks in in-house developed applications, particularly if they are not vital for the enterprise (harder to have resources to maintain/enhance). Risk of SaaS provider goi…

I disagree completely. Another benefit of traditional on-prem vendors is that it's a lot easier to get source code escrow written into the contract as a force majeur or bankruptcy contingency.

I was going to reply this to a different guy, but in my experience the risks of the in-house app going out of maintenance due to dev attrition or whatever are far lower than most people think. Stuff that's business critical is almost always staffed appropriately, and stuff that people perceive as business critical but actually isn't is usually the [large group of small apps] that aren't well supported. The big problem is the rinky dink Excel macros, VBA/COM+ add-ins, and random isolate single developer crap that nobody knows about except the end users.