The rise of on-premise software? What do you think?
I've been in software industry since 1999 and built several on-premise solutions, sold to ten thousands of customers in more than 150 countries... Since 2006, I've been in SaaS as well with my co-founder and built several SaaS businesses... What I observe is, there's an uptrend again on the on-premise world, what do you think? What are your observations about the trend in coming years?
Here in Spain a lot of companies prefer on-premise software but not because of a trend, just because of ignorance.
A month ago a client told us they didn't want to use AWS because they were sure that Amazon would steal employees emails to send them products advertising. It was a very WTF moment.
Which means you can easily outreach to the Spanish market with "use on-premise and protect your data" :)
Is it just ignorance or a well-founded distrust of the business ethics of companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and so on?
American companies and perhaps even millions of consumers may have no problem with the mantra that there is no such thing as privacy any more but that does not mean the mantra is or even should be universally accepted.
Amazon also has poor business ethics. Bezos is not a nice man and does not partner well. In the indie author world, the actions of his company have wiped people out overnight because the company has suddenly changed direction or reduced royalties or changed algorithms or performed mass sweeps of dodgy products without distinguishing between bona fire authors and scammers.
Entire livelihoods have been endangered within an hour.
So perhaps your Spanish clients simply prefer not to give control of their business to a third party which they do not trust. If I needed that sort of cloud computing, it would a condition of my contract with you that you place my software anywhere BUT Amazon because it is too political, too greedy, too selfish and too cavalier a player to trust.
I see your point. I'm not saying that everyone who prefers on-premise software is dumb. I'm not saying that Amazon is the perfect example of good ethics. We work with some clients that need on-premise software because of serious reasons, not because of nonsense. And that's okay.
A client prefers an on-premise solution? That's great. But I want that client to make that decision with real facts, not because of bullshit.
My work is not only doing what the client asks for. I try to understand what they need, what their real pain is, and bring up the perfect solution for them, even is this solution is not what the client asks for initially. Of course, the client makes the final decision, but that's the value we add. And I knew that in their situation a cloud solution was better for them that using their own servers.
Finally, this client opted for AWS and congratulated us because we were the first provider who understood their real needs, cared about them, and taught them about these issues.
All fair points and I was not suggesting for a moment that you would ever try to push the wrong solution.
In this instance, I would have accepted your technical recommendation but not your preferred provider and the reason would have been as I stated earlier. That was really what I was getting at.
I've been working a quite a bit on on-premise solutions (as a concept). Lately I've been asked to prove that's something that's wanted, so I'm glad to hear you bring this up and affirm it.
Personally, I think there are ways to do that which offer huge benefits, but it doesn't have to be an either/or solution (online/not online : Cloud/no Cloud). The end user can, and should have control of those options.
It's a must-have for many businesses as it often helps them to mitigate various security and compliance issues. It was actually a competitive advantage to have an on-prem offering at a few places I've worked and given that more and more businesses are employing internal engineering teams it seems likely, as you say, that this is a trend set to continue (as have in-house expertise increasing accessibility for businesses). You have to really get your licensing right mind you!
We're definitely seeing this tool, and I think it's a good thing.
With Dependabot we're seeing more and more large organisations ask to use us on-prem. We don't support it yet (we're 50% through the build required to do so) but will soon, and every organisation we've spoken to using on-prem has been happy to pay a much higher price.
You are saying you have already asked them about how much they'd be willing to pay for the on-prem stuff?
Yes - first thing I do when people get in touch is tell them when we think it will be ready and quote the expected price, asking them to confirm they're interested.