Phil Wainewright provided a very interesting analysis of Intalio’s new ‘hybrid’ Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing offering which echos the approach I suggested last Fall.

My original blog was inspired by the belief that technology is advancing at a fast enough rate to make it possible to offer a fully contained SaaS ‘appliance’ deployable behind the firewall to alleviate customer concerns regarding data security, service availability and/or performance.

While some of my friends at Salesforce.com said my idea was crazy, my blog post prompted many SaaS and cloud computing vendors to comment that they were already offering flexible deployment options to satisfy various customer preferences.

Of course, the key to this go-to-market strategy is the ability to lock-down the code base so that the SaaS vendor is only supporting one version of the its solution, no matter where it is is deployed.

By putting their SaaS solution into a ‘lockbox’ that can be deployed wherever the customer prefers, vendors can now substantially expand their addressable market for their ‘on-demand’ solutions.

Intalio is also offering a managed service option in which the company will administer the customer’s behind-the-firewall deployment of its solution. I published a profile of BMC’s attempts to offer these three options in 2006. BMC was unable to make this approach work because its solution was not truly multitenant and its corporate culture wasn’t properly aligned to support this go-to-market strategy.

In my view, SaaS vendors will not be alone  in offering location-independent solutions. You should expect to see the rapidly growing array of ‘cloud computing’ vendors also heading in this direction. While many users will prefer to take advantage of the online, offsite aspects of these services, a significant number of organizations–large and small–will be comforted to know that they can also deploy them on-premise to meet their specific needs or satisfy their individual preferences.

The bottomline is that offering customers various deployment choices may become a key to gaining long-term success in the SaaS and cloud computing market.

cloud computing Intalio SaaS Software-as-a-Service