SaaS cloud hosted solutions vs on prem solutions? Not necessarily a bad move. You can save money and a lot of overhead and headaches if the software we’re talking about has a lot of different potential hosting providers / licensors so that prices are competitive.
Things like choosing who to host your PostgresDb, sure you could do it on prem, but it will likely be cheaper to pick a cloud host. BUT, that’s only because Postgres is open source, leaving tons of hosting providers to compete, and it is also still very similar to the rest of SQL dbs, leaving for extremely little lock-in, both amongst DBs and amongst hosts.
Salesforce though, and similar cloud platforms, are the opposite of that. Everything you build on them is completely locked into them. The DBs are salesforces’ custom db technology (which sucks), their interfaces are coded in a combination of one of three different Salesforce specific programming languages / frameworks, and it does extremely little out of the box, meaning that as a company when you adopt it, you have to spend a ton of time and money on a salesforce admin / specialist to set everything up for you, likely a bunch of coders to write custom code for you, and at the end of the day, because of its restrictions you’ll still produce a piece of crap interface / application that requires weeks of training for any employee to use.
And after all of that, Salesforce willl still charge you somewhere on the order of 10-1000x as much for simple stuff like /GB of db storage, compared to open source competitive DBs.
When platforms have that much lock-in, then they’re ripe for exploitation, which is why Salesforce is so insanely profitable. I can pretty much guarantee you that every mid size and larger company that uses Salesforce would have spend far less money overall by hiring a dedicated software development team to build out their own applications and infrastructure using open source (cloud hosted) services.
SaaS cloud hosted solutions vs on prem solutions? Not necessarily a bad move. You can save money and a lot of overhead and headaches if the software we’re talking about has a lot of different potential hosting providers / licensors so that prices are competitive.
Things like choosing who to host your PostgresDb, sure you could do it on prem, but it will likely be cheaper to pick a cloud host. BUT, that’s only because Postgres is open source, leaving tons of hosting providers to compete, and it is also still very similar to the rest of SQL dbs, leaving for extremely little lock-in, both amongst DBs and amongst hosts.
Salesforce though, and similar cloud platforms, are the opposite of that. Everything you build on them is completely locked into them. The DBs are salesforces’ custom db technology (which sucks), their interfaces are coded in a combination of one of three different Salesforce specific programming languages / frameworks, and it does extremely little out of the box, meaning that as a company when you adopt it, you have to spend a ton of time and money on a salesforce admin / specialist to set everything up for you, likely a bunch of coders to write custom code for you, and at the end of the day, because of its restrictions you’ll still produce a piece of crap interface / application that requires weeks of training for any employee to use.
And after all of that, Salesforce willl still charge you somewhere on the order of 10-1000x as much for simple stuff like /GB of db storage, compared to open source competitive DBs.
When platforms have that much lock-in, then they’re ripe for exploitation, which is why Salesforce is so insanely profitable. I can pretty much guarantee you that every mid size and larger company that uses Salesforce would have spend far less money overall by hiring a dedicated software development team to build out their own applications and infrastructure using open source (cloud hosted) services.