Possibly someone who wanted to heavily customize the software to suit their business.</i?
I would say most SaaS offerings are highly customisable and have the ability to integrate with other applications, be it either another SaaS offering or an on-premise offering. It is one of the reasons SFDC has done so well. Zen, Apptus, ServiceMax, SAP, Oracle, Siebel, and probably just about everything else can intregrate with it that eventually you have so much custom code and integration points that that doing an upgrade is a fairly major project.
I have been been living and supporting the Asia region for the last 14 years and supporting SFDC for about 10 at a few different companies, it has always been heavily customised. One place that is sometimes can create issues is in China. Most companies will have SFDC working without VPN but China is always playing with their great firewall and occasionally we have found that connectivity can be troublesome in the field. The office works which usually are on private company networks so occasionally we would have to ask the sales in China to use VPN to their local office to update SFDC.
I would say most SaaS offerings are highly customisable
A good SaaS offering is likely to be highly configurable, but customization is another issue. I speak as a former developer and purveyor of an ERP package. Many of my prospects had source code to their applications and had layered 10 years of modifications on top of what they got from the vendor. Often, these modifications were highly specific to the individual company.
I didn’t want this to happen to my software and had the tools to make development extremely cost effective if my company did it instead of the customer. Whenever I got a customization request, I would try very hard to identify a more general underlying business problem and design a solution around that so that I could incorporate the feature in the core software. This involved some configuration (turn feature on or off), but 99% of the software could be installed on every site. Only things like custom forms were likely to be customer-specific. This was highly unusual among my competition.
Name a time Azure has gone down leaving its customrs in a lerch.
FYI, It has happened just this morning.
“Summary of Impact: Starting at 04:39 UTC on 19 Nov 2018 customers in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas regions may experience difficulties signing into Azure resources, such as Azure Active Directory, when Multi-Factor Authentication is required by policy.”
While this outage may not create a large issue, but what would happen if your customer was NYSE, NASDAQ or the CBOE? Ummm, does the stock market come to a hault because of an authentication change?
This is just some of the reasons companies may not go to the cloud or at least invest heavily in the cloud.