T&E Watch: Do You Concur? At Least Not Behind the Firewall Anymore ...
Here's a little tidbit that provides further evidence that software as a services (SaaS) is taking over many subsets of the applications market. Concur, one of the leaders in the T&E space, is rumored to be dropping support for its behind the firewall applications as of December 31st, 2010. My sources tell me that there will be no customer support after this date for installed customers. Moreover, Concur has stopped selling new installed seats already, even to current customers. There's also discussion circulating -- though I do not have it confirmed -- that Concur will stop supporting Gelco users at some point in the future, pushing them entirely to Concur's SaaS-based T&E solutions. What do you think? Is T&E an area where installed makes any sense going forward? Even if it does not, I still think that software providers have a commercial and moral obligation to support products they've sold in the past.
- Jason Busch
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Can't have your cake & eat it too. When did obligations become arbitrary????
Doesn't this happen all of the time? Software suppliers (dare I suggest... Microsoft?) has built fortunes on obsolescence. I don't condone it but, isn't it just the way things work? (except, of course, for SAAS)
Dude, 8-track? You're dating yourself, man.
Point taken, but still, when you've got hundreds of thousands of seats out there for an enterprise application -- not a desktop productivity suite -- I would still believe there's some obligation to continuing offering support rather than discontinuing the entire business model that you built your company on. Call me old-school (not as old-school as you, mind you, given those listening tastes), but I detect a whiff of something in the air ...
Wayne: Do you smell bacon, Garth?
Garth: I definitely smell a pork product of some kind.
Rock on,
Jason
E.g. double the support pricing every year for the BTF product until customers see the hosted light.
As a user of the Concur T&E system, I couldn't imagine any company running it behind their firewall given the typical solid availability and robust feature set. What justification other than "that's the way it has always been" does a company have for sticking with it as a behind the firewall app? I believe a data security/ownership perspective is the only leg to stand on there for the enterprise app deployment instead of SaaS model. And even then I find that one a bit of a stretch in today's world.
There's also an important risk of unfairly charging the customer twice for the same IP, represented by the software. For a new customer, the SaaS charge includes renting the IP, hosting, support and future enhancements. The first of these probably represents about half the price. An existing customer already has a right to that IP, since it bought a license and paid maintenance on it. So switch me to SaaS, fine, but my charge should be 50% less than a new customer would pay for the service.
I think that what you propose is a fair and creative proposal. But I'd like to get a better handle on Concur's -- as an example -- installed base (and I mean truly installed vs. SaaS base). If we are talking 100+ companies being forced to make the switch, it still strikes me -- despite the good arguments put forth above -- like an unnecessary inconvenience put onto a good many customers who, at the time they bought the application, had no reason to believe that they would be forced off of it. Perhaps Obama should swoop in and offer to provide a government-back warranty of on-premise software -- support and upgrades included -- to put some confidence back into the enterprise software buying market ;-)