The Future of SaaS - Part 1: Visma’s Øystein Moan on the advantages of SaaS, the challenges to get there and how much road there is left
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What are the fundamental differences between SaaS and traditional on‑premise software models?
Many ways it was easier running a software company back in the days than it is now. It's harder. I think you can say that if you're able to do multi-day releases, you are at state of the art of software development and you can act so much faster. It's much more efficient. So that's quality itself to be able to release that often because it means that you have all the right processes in place. I think we've really We didn't get the transition going before we started to buy good cloud companies that already had started up from scratch, as you said Nick, without any commitments and without any customers and with new people, maybe newly educated people.
Welcome to a series of conversations that I've got the pleasure to have with Oyston Moen. Weiston, as many of you will know, is the long term CEO of Visma and has got forty years experience in the tech sector and particularly the software sector. It's been my pleasure to work with him for the last fourteen plus years, fifteen plus years on the board of Visma and also to say he's a very good kind of friend as well as as a business colleague. So Oiston Welcome.
Thank you, thank you.
So I guess this first set of conversations is probably going to be around SaaS and cloud and how those changes have kind of shaped the technology industry. So the first thing I was going to ask really was how you think about the features of running a SaaS business and how that differs from running an older on prem software business?
Yes, that's a quite short question, but it will be quite long answer, I'm afraid. Sorry about that. Because running a SaaS business is almost running a whole new industry compared to the classic software business. Because it's so different from classic software. That's why also so many companies struggle with the transition because it's actually so different.
Yeah.
And it's the the last big transition in the IT industry was when we went from centralized mainframe and mini computers to PCs and local computing. That was also a very big padding shift, which a lot of companies struggled with and most of the large Companies are dominating in the seventies, early eighties, they could not cope with that transition. This is the the
wangs and the decks just Stan and the
decks and the primes and Apollo and Burroughs and Univac and C D C and all the names that hardly anyone can remember anymore. But they were giants in the in the seventies. Yeah. IBM alone were s uh sixty percent of the whole it industry in nineteen seventy nine. Yeah. And only uh young people don't know who IBM is these days. Absolutely. Yeah. So the transition to cloud is in many ways as dramatic when we know going sort of back to centralized computing, but in a very different way than it was in the 70s and 80s obviously. So the transition is about how we develop the software, the technology. It's about the revenue model, and even more about the operations. So if you start with operations, in the old world, when you had Windows software, you developed the software, maybe one major release every year, maybe one extra release.
You sent out with a new release CDs to all the customers and they have either resellers or you provide a lot of consultancy and system integration yourself and implemented that software as is on their Infrastructure.
Yeah.
And many software companies who did that themselves maybe had 60-70% of the revenue in consulting for implementation and support.
Yeah.
And anyone who has implemented, for instance, an SAP system know how much work that is. And that was classic. A lot of money made on the system integration and development were quite insulated from the customers and you made software and sold it as is, including a lot of bugs of course, but all the consultants were fixing that.
Yeah.
In the cloud world it's so much different. You are as a cloud provider, you are hosting the applications yourself.
Yeah.
You take on the responsibility of the security, cybersecurity, the backup, the performance. Uh and the software lives on the one place on your infrastructure.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What are the fundamental differences between SaaS and traditional on‑premise software models?
0:02–6:02
2
How does Visma’s transition to cloud affect software release frequency and quality?
6:02–13:02
3
What are the biggest technical and cultural challenges Visma faced when moving to SaaS?
13:02–23:29
4
Why does Visma consider skill‑set changes and vested interests the main obstacles to SaaS adoption?
23:29–24:50
Speakers
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