SIAA OnDemand Conference 2008

I just attended the SIAA OnDemand Conference with our CEO and CFO. I actually didn't have high expectations, because the session summaries seemed to imply that the conference was aimed at client/server vendors that were considering migrating to SaaS. As it turned out, there was a broad variety of content, and we all walked away feeling like we had gained a lot.

I learned a new respect for Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com; Josh James, CEO of Omniture; and Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. These guys are true visionaries, and they "get" OnDemand software, even though their views conflict at times.

I was particularly impressed by Zach Nelson. His keynote was actually a "point/counterpoint" session with Anthony Lye, SVP of CRM at Oracle. Lye was obviously a smart guy, but he made a fair number of statements (minimizing the value of multi-tenancy, for example) that really didn't ring true.

The main impression that Lye left me with was how deeply entrenched senior executives at Oracle are in the anti-Microsoft mindset, and how arrogant they are about the superiority of Larry Ellison's vision of the enterprise.

Lye lamented the disastrous effects of Microsoft's "monopoly" on the OS, and said that it stifled innovation, and that it "didn't do any good for anyone." I would imagine that Microsoft stakeholders would dispute that assertion. So would hundreds of thousands of software developers that were suddenly able to administer their own database servers when SQL Server 7.0 was released. Or the millions of home users who could suddenly use a word processor to write letters when Word for Windows was released. And on and on and on.

Anyway, aside from the fact that Lye forgot that he wasn't at an Oracle Microsoft-bashing conference, he clearly didn't "get" SaaS and its value in the small and mid-market. (His primary argument against the value of multi-tenancy was that "none of the customers that we asked wanted to be in a multi-tenant environment." Well, duh! If you had a choice to fly in a private jet or a commercial airliner (for the same price), which would you choose? The point is that multi-tenancy lowers the cost of delivery and, hence, the overall cost of the solution.

But the conference was excellent, and very worthwhile. It was definitely targeted at C-level executives (the vast majority of attendees were CEOs or CFOs), so if you don't fall into that category I'd probably recommend the OpSource SaaS Conference next March (it was recommended to me by a Microsoft rep).

Speaking of Microsoft, they were conspicuously absent from this conference. I'm not sure why, unless they felt it was just too small. Or perhaps they find more value in talking to IT directors and engineers.