Hi captain,
Let me clarify: I am not saying it is better/worse for AYX to be SaaS. The OP did indeed state AYX is not SaaS and in the multiple posts following there were discussion on the merit of this argument. I am not going to add more on that point.
The OP stated in his first post and even more directly in the followups that he believed that AYX customers (and thus AYX) would benefit from the scalability and reduced infra management that being a single or multi-tenant public cloud hosted service could provide. I am paraphrasing significantly.
My point was not to debate whether this would be “good” or “bad”, but more a point on timing and strategy. If AYX comes out and says that customers want a completely clientless experience from a browser, with zero infra to manage, and that they are shifting to deliver this, I would want to understand what this shift does to the “current” viability of AYX as an investment.
This would necessitate a shift in engineering/sales/strategy that would require them to neglect or deprioritize other endeavors. Ask NTNX how tectonic shifts such as these go if they are not managed with absolute precision, alignment, and clarity on change management to the market and customers - that may be an offtopic example, but it is absolutely relevant in my opinion.
I suggest that customers can obtain scalability with AYX with cloud based approaches, that address a lot (but not all) of what Muji has very well identified in his posts. This could be done today with no strategic shift from AYX. I would recommend these case studies to anyone interested, which fully describe how large customers have scalable solutions with cloud based infra, that address the points Muji identified.
https://www.alteryx.com/partners/technology-partners/amazon-…
Does this create the completely clientless and OS independent service? No. However, I do not currently think that AYX customers and potential customers weigh the lack of a 100% SaaS product as a reason not to implement AYX. AYX management does not seem to think this is a burning priority given the capability of server side solutions they have developed with MSFT and AMZN for Azure and AWS.
I believe AYX has a wide moat, and that even if a competitor were able to copy/paste what they deliver, but wrapped in a completely cloud service based product - this would take years, and existing AYX customers would strongly vet the viability of the new product. In the time this new competitor gets to market, I see AYX moving far beyond where they are today. As a step further, I think the dynamics of cloud based services would have even evolved so that we are talking about delivery models beyond SaaS/PaaS, etc.
From an investment standpoint, AYX is in a dominant position with how they deliver the product today. They may absolutely want to change this in the future, and for good reasons. As investors we have to watch to see where they believe their service delivery model needs to go and what that means to their overall strategy.