Traditionally, software vendors have relied heavily on partnerships with VARs and consultants as a reliable marketing channel to woo customers to their products. This had the worthy advantages of spreading marketing costs and leveraging existing B2B relationships at the consultant/client level to sell software, and everyone benefited: the software vendor sold more software, the consultant/VAR sold more of their own time and ancillary bits and pieces to go along with it.

As Phil Wainewright points out today, SaaS vendors don't have it so easy. What traditional consultant or VAR is going to sell a package which pretty much obviates their "value added" or which promises to reduce, rather than increase, their consulting hours in the coming years (well, me; I just finished recommending a well-known CRM SaaS application to a client, who will probably never talk to me again, but I like to think of myself as non-traditional anyway)? What IT professional is going to put themselves out of a job by recommending something like this internally, obviating the need for their position to tweak, wheedle, and maintain complex on-premises hardware and applications? Phil discusses the various approaches SaaS vendors have tried, and failed, including such memorable partnerships as Comcast and Microsoft .

I think there probably is still some niche for the VAR, as on can see already with the expansion of Salesforce's AppExchange 3rd party add-on marketplace... I've already seen AppExchange developers advertising on Craigslist. But I thought it might be more interesting to turn the question around: what do CIO's see as the venue where they would prefer to find SaaS offerings? Answer that question and the other falls with it.