So, the big news today (well, not the really big news, which is, of course, that the Spanish media is reporting that Arsenal may trade Henry for Eto'o plus 17 million pounds - I'll take it!) is Jason Maynard's provocative research note that suggests that there aren't enough quality On Demand/SaaS offerings out there. We actually have the same problem here in open source land: great potential, but still in the ea So, the big news today (well, not the really big news, which is, of course, that the Spanish media is reporting that Arsenal may trade Henry for Eto’o plus 17 million pounds – I’ll take it!) is Jason Maynard’s provocative research note that suggests that there aren’t enough quality On Demand/SaaS offerings out there. We actually have the same problem here in open source land: great potential, but still in the early days of our growth. He writes:We stand by our call that On Demand computing is actually an under-hyped transformation of the software industry. Business software customers have been shackled by the complexity, cost, and inflexibility of traditional on premise software. We believe that On Demand computing will grow to over $21 billion in revenue by 2011. The rise of software as a service is fundamentally changing the rules of software and ushering in a new era of asymmetric warfare that is poised to break the traditional rules of the game. We firmly believe that in the coming year some On Demand vendors will introduce advertising-based or at least partially subsidized software offerings. The premise to our valuation argument is that incumbent vendors like Microsoft will have a difficult time organically shifting their business model to On Demand computing. Since the On Demand model is so disruptive from a licensing, deployment, and DNA perspective it could attract outside entrants into the business software space. Cisco has already made a move for WebEx. Why couldn’t an IBM or even an ADP extend their respective models? It’s fascinating to me how closely this language mimics what we say about open source. I’ve noted before that SaaS and open source are true bosom buddies. I would expect to see more partnerships between the two worlds before long. (Interestingly, though perhaps not directly correlated, JasperSoft is one of the top applications on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange….) At any rate, welcome to the wild west of disruption. No, Mike, I’m not suggesting that the end is nigh for proprietary software companies. Remember: I came from Novell, which has persisted at $1B despite seeing its glory years fade over a decade ago. But I am suggesting that disruption is afoot, and only those who embrace it will dominate the next two decades of technology discussion. Open Source