Thanks to Jason Corsello’s recent blog post, the HCM community is buzzing about some recent statements made by Harry Debes, our CEO, about the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. First of all, I’m impressed by Jason’s reach. I haven’t talked to anyone in the industry since he published the post that didn’t ask me about it – Jason, your readership is listening! The real question: does the old adage ‘all publicity is good publicity’ still hold? In this case, I think so.
But seriously – let me put the debate on this topic to bed. Harry was commenting about the role of SaaS in the global Lawson business – our suite of manfacturing, financials, procurement, supply chain and HCM products. And he stands by his position – he simply doesn’t believe that companies like Lawson have a viable business model in serving the market exclusively through SaaS. With that said, we’ve had his consistent support for the work we’ve done in launching Lawson Talent Management with a SaaS model.
The reality, though, is this – we’ve been hearing from our customers for 18 months that they want choice. They want to choose how they license our software (perpetual or subscription pricing), where they deploy it (on premise or via SaaS) and which applications in talent management they buy (and when). If you’d like to read more about our thoughts on this, look here.
So what about SaaS – we are delivering our Talent Management applications in this model, and have been doing so since the day we started selling the product. We will continue to offer that option to customers, and the market will decide. The best news? We know how to deliver our customers a choice, and can do it with the best Talent Management functionality in the business.
Want to learn more? Send me an e-mail, leave a comment or come and see us next month at HR Technology, when we’ll be ready to tell you the whole story.
Perceptive HR Technology 
Larry-
Thanks for the kind words. If Harry could have only said it so eloquently as you. 🙂 In my crystal ball…
1. You are spot on that the large ERPs have a great opportunity to provide multiple delivery models that provide differentiation and choice to the market.
2. Contrary to popular belief, SaaS is harder than most think and takes a number of years to get the model right…ERPs shareholders are impatient and therefore, I predict many of the ERPs will retreat and go the buy (or acquire) route instead of build.
3. If Harry were to come back in a second life and start a new company today, he would do it an a SaaS-only model.
At least we can all thank Harry for keeping the dog days of summer interesting!