Thanks, Bill. As I said, I did not include all of the possible interrogatories in my example. I just wanted to get across that useful analytics requires deep domain expertise delivered in a simple package, just like TurboTax does for tax filing. I will add both posts to the LI group soon.

We will have to agree to disagree. You may also want to look at the follow up post - http://blogerp.typepad.com/hcm_research/2013/02/putting-more-intelligence-in-business-intelligence.html I think you will see I do not think it is simplistic at all. Big data and associated tools do not necessarily solve the usefulness issue. Also, I think the analogy holds in terms of building domain expertise/intelligence into the tools themselves.

Thanks, Alistair and Mike.

Thanks, Bill. Life has also intervened as we recently bought a new house and moved. So, hopefully, as things settle down, I will have more bandwidth to post.

John, Thanks for the comment on an oldie, but a goodie. If you look at the official Gartner definition, we say that SaaS requires a single line of code and data definition to be used across multiple customers. So, I guess it depends on how you define customers. You could certainly define it to be internal customers. I have also seen as an example in public sector, a single solution being managed by a central agency with agencies or departments running on the same instance of the application. So, there is definitely precedent.

Antoine, I do not think it is marketing hype. I laid out a few facts and what I thought was interesting at the conference (like the customer presentations). As the title indicated, it was a trip report. The post was not meant to be analysis with customer advice. When I do that kind of work, it is published on the Gartner.com site for our clients. This is a personal blog.

Vinnie, you are right. The scale of success for DBS vs. SAP and Oracle is vastly different in all of the dimensions you point out. There have been more successful vendors than DBS and when they stumbled they were acquired (PeopleSoft and Siebel come to mind immediately) and that could certainly happen here. The fall may not be as fast either. I think it is a question of where the center of gravity in the business applications market resides. For more than a decade, SAP and Oracle more than anyone else have been the center of the universe. I am asking the question of whether or not they can continue as the center with this shift. It is certainly not a forgone conclusion.

Bill, you are quite right. To be honest, I did not go back and search for the exact dates and figures, but the additional facts support the premise of my argument well. Thanks for providing them. As I said, DBS was a little late to market.

Thanks, Jason. I agree with you about the scenarios. They are not going away and they should be business-oriented. I also agree with how easy (or difficult) it is to do scenarios and "sandboxes". It takes work (which is why I posed the question at the end about if it is too hard). There are a lot of ramifications for consulting firms working with clients on selections that I could not explore in a short post. Maybe I will in a subsequent post.

Peter, Thanks for the comments (and sorry for the long approval time - I just missed it). I think that most people think of SaaS as multi-tenant software. The point of the post was to show that multi-tenant software was not the only way to achieve many of the same benefits. What multi-tenant software has done is enforce a discipline around customization and upgrades that was not there previously and a lot of the benefits (though not all) can be attributed to this. However, it is not the only way to enforce that discipline.

Good points. There is certainly a marketing challenge. Perhaps, the vendor would set up a separate business unit (even brand). It would not necessarily be for existing customers, just new customers.