Not Kel Hoffmann of Whitebirch Planning. The president of the 9 year old strategic financial planning software vendor, which offers both SaaS and stand-alone versions of its Whitebirch Planning product, says, "Basically what we want is users." Whether they use the online offering or purchase the software to install and run locally matters little to Hoffmann.

This is in stark contrast to recent buzz coming from a recent BusinessWeek article calling on-demand computing "A Brutal Slog." Finding agreement from such utility computing proponents as Nick Carr, this contrary view of SaaS' bright future has caught a wave in the blogosphere and sent up tendrils of doubt over the transition from shrinkwrap to service in the software business.

Illustrated primarily by the examples of Oracle and SAP, which have sometimes been seen as floundering in their attempts to bring SaaS offerings to market, BusinessWeek points out that with ludicrous maintenance and upgrade fees associated with their traditional product lines that it's really to their benefit to delay SaaS roll-outs as long as possible. This isn't a new dilemma; Microsoft has been facing the same issue as web-based software has begun to challenge its core products, and the only question remaining is how long they can milk their customers until something better and cheaper comes along (whether they offer it or not)... and possibly, whether or not they can keep their reputation through the ordeal (as their fledging struggles to roll out their own hosted version of Exchange has caused problems with existing Exchange hosting providers).

This may well be true of big vendors, with large enterprise customers in the crosshairs. But for vendors such as Whitebirch, aimed at the SMB or departmental markets, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by pursuing the SaaS route. Hoffmann says that they saw early on the advantages of providing their offering as a service online. While big vendors have legacy customer bases they think they need to protect, and legacy code to deal with, Whitebirch and other small shops can use both their flexible delivery and aggressive pricing to attract customers without the expensive marketing that BusinessWeek assumes is necessary for the task. And without being shackled by legacy code and concepts, the product turned out by such vendors is vastly better suited for the SaaS space than that turned out by larger shops. Whitebirch's on-demand product is browser-based, lightning fast, and has possibly the best drag and drop, on-the-fly report writing component I have ever seen. If you didn't know it was AJAX, you wouldn't believe it. The quality speaks for itself; the fact it was developed from the outset as a browser-based application makes all the difference.

What remains to be seen is whether or not this new wave of vendors can break the hold of large, legacy systems in corporate environments. System transitions have always been expensive propositions, and they are becoming moreso as the underlying data and processing environments have become more complex. It was quite a job to move accounting of the corporate mainframe back in the eighties to client/server based systems; it's a hundred times more difficult to transition an entire ERP system over to a cloud base (not that there is even such thing to move to at this point) and there will doubtless be a whole other level of resistance to doing so. Will this cramp, or at least slow, adoption of new technologies? Or is there enough room around the edges, places for the Whitebirch's of the world, to work their way into and keep up the pace of technology development and adoption?