So often I think systems developers lose touch with the systems they put out there.

I'll focus this comment on Software as a Service for the moment. SaaS can be delivered as a single or multi tenant offering. The basic difference is that Single tenant is designed for each individual client/company and hosted in such a way that a change to their software will not affect the software of other client/companies hosted on the same servers. Multi tenant is a one software fits all approach and any change will need to be adopted by all clients/companies who subscribe to that software. The multi tenant approach is becoming ever more popular and is starting to fall under the banner of the "Cloud."

Once again I'm going to narrow my focus down to the Multi tenant offering. This model relies on a large client base who subscribe for a low cost ,subscription based pricing model. There may of course be deviations to this basic pricing model and you can read all about the topic  in William Blares L.L.C.TECHNOLOGY:SOFTWARE & SERVICES September 26,2007Industry Report.

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 I had a SaaS prospect recently who had me deal directly with their IT department. It's a financial solutions and IT had very little idea as to where to start. They were hoping for a wizard driven interface apparently to make it simple for non financial people to load the data in a few minutes and test.

As the SaaS solutions become more and more complex requiring greater departmentally aligned input so more and more of the onus will fall on the departments to do a lot more of the evaluation. This is driven further by the fact that the Vendors will have less input in building Pilot models for prospects as the price of software falls and the cost of sales has to drop as a result.  In my view this is not a bad thing in that  the cost of ownership falls closer to the end users as a result.