SaaS vs Open Source. Who will win ?

It is only due to the competition from open source the concept of SAAS is initialised. Need to observe how SAAS actually works in long term with due consideration to cost factor and data privacy. Open source has already made its mark.

Saas is a realization for the readytouse and/or ready to integrate users. Even then its more suited for experimental usage (as of now), may be because of security, privacy and cost factor.

Again consider the cost factor when Saas are made up of commercial licensed OS, Application the OEM licensing will eventually change based on subscription.

Another to consider is net connectivity (leaving out some cases of offline sync) most of them will be online. this maynot be good for product developers, and opensource is the only way to take the development to offline , offsite places.

Confidentiality of business data (privacy) will not allow many domain specific services available on Saas. 

On the mobile client devices, agreed Saas is the answer as it enables quickly and remotely

Saas for private clouds are very effective and are real requirement. where inter corporation / inter organisation sharing / distribution can improve tremendously. 

Solutions Architects can quickly evaluate and freeze on decisions using Saas. but during implementation the would have to do everything the Provider did for themselves (in production) and that may be a pain they will be passing-on to developers/deployers.

Mr.Hari Prasad has made some valid points & regarding the customization of SAAS that he is talking about I would like to add on to his point that now most of the major SaaS companies offer customization tools, but their features vary widely. Some may also require you to learn a proprietary programming language, which can be a negative when it comes to finding skilled staff.But Open source, on the other hand, is infinitely flexible. Most applications support the most popular scripting and programming languages. You may also have a large library of available enhancements from which to choose.Also some open source providers also offer their products as a service. That gives you the option of starting to use the software as a service and moving to a fully installed version later.So open source in my view is somewhat better than SAAS.Don't you guys think so?

Ted I fully agree with your comments

i totally agree with you...even when you talk about Saas its more about the opensource :)

opensource

surely opensource

Mr.Anant i agree that SAAS and open source both complements each other in some way and it can be very difficult to choose between them.But adding to what you said i would say that One appeal of open source is that you always have control of your data. SaaS providers offer profuse promises that customer data is never compromised and is professionally backed up and secured. But those promises still ring hollow for some organizations that simply will not put their data in someone else's hands. If owning the data is a big issue, open source is the way to go.

Although I maybe a little  ignorant but how does this can be a debate.

I mean ,the SAAS is about how u deliver your services to the user/customer i.e via installation or web.

where as Open source is about the code ,contribution and all.

Open source Vs SAAS?Is i am wrong.Open source can be compared to Closed Source software. but not to SAAS.

I mean... see that we are letting the users using our product through internet and it can be open source too at the same time.

Whether SaaS or Open source is determined by the requirement of an individual organization.  For example: it might be very difficult to have customization done in a SaaS model whereas the entire source code is available for the same in Opensource.

From a definite perspective, Opensource sure has more advantages than the SaaS model.  However, SaaS might be best suited in generic cases like CRM and also to those organizations who would like to avoid the administrative burdens.

I agree with anant with respect to open source.Despite the fact that I do believe in SaaS, I am finding that the current crop of SaaS companies are middling at best, with only a few standouts whereas there are many great open source companies.In open source we talk about "the community" and how it creates a larger development society. This is doesn't seem to be the case with SaaS.One other key aspect of community is that open source has both "developers" and "users" where SaaS tends to only have "users" which we should probably term "consumers" since there haven't been many well known contributions from SaaS companies back to OSS projects.

Let me give you a small example: A community of buyers and sellers are in a need of SCM solution.But there difficulty lies in no software expertise, no hardware, no resources to build such an application.A vendor who is expert in making Software Applications using Open Source Technologies realises this need, and develops a full-fledged application using only Open Source Solutions with Zero cost, offers his solution to the community as SaaS, and charges him as per the usage.

So, what I wish to say is Saas depends on Open Source, and in no way they can be against each other, instead Open Source reduces cost to implement Saas applications hence complement it.

In my opinion, they sell to different users. Open source appeals to the developer who is looking to create, invent and move their business and technology forward. SaaS appeals to non-technical business folks who are more focused on the business and less focused on the technology. They have different inroads to businesses but yes majority of the software-as-a-service providers will rely on open source software by 2011 to save money. How you guys see SAAS - Open Source collaboration ? And what bottlenecks can arise ?

The open source helps user to weive together some specific solution at lower costs and addresses most of the requirements.   

SaaS means some company provides the software as a services. Initially they offer at lower price but once customer becomes habitual of the service they start showing hidden costs, which makes the technology unaffordable.

Also nobody works for short period, each company nomatter whats their size considers the technology for long period. So, open source is a right choice.