The Real Reason On-Premises Software is Lousy

Flexera recently published a research report called the Monetization Monitor: Monetization Models and Pricing. It covers a lot of interesting insights on licensing but what I want to focus on is a specific data point they share on deployments:

63% of software organizations continue to have moderate to extensive on-premises deployments. — Flexera

This statistic is not a total surprise. However, if you do a review of current product management blogs, books, podcasts, and tweets you will find a number of modern product development best practices that simply do not work with on-premises software. Some can with extra work, but most do not. This is a problem.

Modern Product Management practices are built to provide more value to customers faster. Without these practices in place, it means that vendors are delivering less value than would be possible with SaaS models.

Below I explore a few of these best practices and how they relate to on-premises software.

Agile Software Development

The Agile Manifesto was written before cloud and SaaS computing was a thing. So, of course, it can work within on-premises software products but the last decade has demonstrated it fits even better with SaaS.