Computer Associates CEO Sanjay Kumar may be right but, at the same time, I don’t think the software rental will work well until all corporate/business enterprise data is universally accessible through the so-called software rental database.
The big software vendors can make a database that is cheap to rent, but when the client wants to move they cannot take their data with them because their data is not compatible to their competitor’s database. Then what?
The vendors of the software rental model may say that they can offer data-conversion so that their system can work with their client’s older or current data, but at what cost? If the market does go to rent this software, then we will see a whole set of computer consultants/vendors that do nothing but convert data from one database to the next one.
So, overall there are no real benefits and a whole lot headaches. I don’t mean to be a pessimist but we do have a long way to go before software rental becomes a viable business.
Lobsang Namgyal
Toronto