After a new value proposition takes the market by storm, as with Salesforce’s SaaS model introduced in 1999, the value proposition will eventually be digested, taken apart and reconstituted.

Grant Miller, CEO of Southern California-based Replicated, rebuilds the SaaS value proposition in a surprising way, as detailed in a TechCrunch opinion piece.

Today, Miller argues, two of the original SaaS arguments are shopworn and are no longer compelling: “Go multi-tenant to save costs” and “Centralize services to ease deployment, maintenance and upgrades”

With respect to multi-tenant, the cost of computing is low, whatever setup you choose. Security and control are paramount; cost savings on computing resources is somewhat less important. Thus the rise of the private cloud and the hybrid cloud.
With respect to centralized services, software buyers have never been comfortable with having customer data on a SaaS provider’s servers. Containerization is a new technology that makes centralized services optional.
Containerization is the future of on-prem. “Enterprise software packed as a set of Docker containers orchestrated by Kubernetes or Docker Swarm, for example, can be installed pretty much anywhere and be live in minutes,” Miller writes.

Bankers, consider that private cloud / on-premises software can be served to users in a browser application (just like SaaS), with deployment, updates and upgrades provided in containers to your IT team. Private cloud / on-premises gains the ease-of-use of SaaS while retaining behind-the-firewall security and control.

The next time a SaaS vendor tells you that your ultra-sensitive bank customer data is safe with them, you could give them your best Office Space impression:

“Yeah, I’m gonna need you to containerize your SaaS, okay? Ah, I almost forgot, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and deploy, maintain and upgrade behind our firewall. So, if you could do that, that would be great…”