These are the final results from the B/OSS magazine online poll asking if people trust RA in the cloud:
- Are you kidding me? RA systems outages would be a nightmare. Sidekick, anyone? 8%
- No. I would like to keep all that sensitive information in-house and locked down. 8%
- Yes. There’s no reason hosted RA over encrypted connections is any more hackable than in-house systems. 29%
- Of course. We do everything else securely online, why not that? 29%
- Usually not, but I would trust it if Subex added it to their new offering, because of who they are. 25%
In short, people mostly do trust cloud-based RA services, but perhaps the kind of people who like the cloud also like online polls! Being serious, RA SaaS looks like it could be a viable offer, though we have not seen if IT functions will act as a block in real life. The fear of poor security over data has stopped many a project. Confidence in the supplier is important. 25% of responses say that Subex could be relied upon to deliver RA SaaS; a supplier with a trusted brand has a head start over rivals.
All vendors now need to look at their offerings and decide if they can afford to ignore SaaS. SaaS offers a lower entry level for OTS RA software. A vendor that can take the low end of the market will be in position to sell more as the customer grows. That means RA in the cloud is not just about extra revenues in the short term, but about building relations in the long term.
