> Companies complaining that SaaS is cutting into their profit margins, are no different than ones complaining that their IT department is cutting into their pr

> Companies complaining that SaaS is cutting into their profit margins, are no different than ones complaining that their IT department is cutting into their profit margins. You’re betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of how software deployments work for most businesses. Theoretically, the choice is between an expensive SaaS product and its equivalent OSS product which would need to be deployed in house. What this scenario misses is that most businesses have really ineffective IT departments which absolutely do not have the ability to: - deploy the OSS versions - guarantee an SLO for the deployment - provide tooling around the OSS deployment Remember that here I’m talking about most businesses; specifically those outside the SV bubble. So SaaS is fundamentally different from outsourcing. The promise of outsourcing is heavily skewed towards reducing costs and SLOs hardly figure into consideration. SaaS tools might be expensive but they guarantee some things. Predictability is hard to get in the software industry; SaaS businesses promise that. Their success reveals a deep desire in the market for predictability around software products. Unless you have a highly qualified SRE team I doubt you can promise the SLOs promised by SaaS vendors.