Cloud washing in Action - Sage ERP MAS 90 Online

Forrester Research has created a term they call "Cloud washing" - which they define as software vendors taking old products and dressing them up in modern new cloud computing clothes.  ZDNet's Larry Dignan says "Cloud washing refers to the practice of slapping the term “cloud” on any old technology you have."

I came across one of the more egregious examples of cloud washing today - in a story on CRN about the launch of new cloud and SaaS versions of Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200 - 1980's era software that's about as non-modern and non-cloud as anything you can imagine.

The story quotes Erik Kaas, VP of product management at Sage, who starts out using adjectives that I would agree with like "online" and "vendor-hosted" when talking about the new MAS 90 and MAS 200 offerings.  But then he goes on to refer to the same products as a Software as a Service, multi-tenant and cloud computing. (Links are to Wikipedia definitions) And that's cloud washing in action.

Update as of November 5 - Sage has apparently contacted CRN and retracted some of their original claims about multi-tenancy and SaaS.  The story no longer uses these words.

What Erik doesn't exactly say is what Sage is actually offering -  a copy of regular old MAS 90 or MAS 200, running in a third party data center and bundled with Citrix so you can access it over the Web, and with monthly subscription pricing. It's 1985 stuff in fancy new cloud clothes.

Some history.  MAS 90 was built back in the mid 1980's by a really great, innovative company called State of the Art Software. The product name MAS 90 actually stands for Master Accounting Series of the 90's. That's back when "of the 90's was cool and futuristic. MAS 90 is a mature and capable product - it's also just really old and it sure isn't modern, cloud or SaaS.

MAS 90 today retains its 1980's architecture file-server based system.  MAS 200 SQL is the same product with the 1990 innovation of running on a client-server relational database.  Both products are fat-client windows products with Windows XP look and feel, neither supports native web-access, and both are single-tenant. Not SaaS, not cloud, not web-native and not multi-tenant.

The Sage partner forum on LinkedIn picked up this blog post and is currently debating in their community of more than 5,000 people. Their main complaints about this post are that they don't like the tone of my writing, (If I sound mean it's unintentional by the way) and some of the folks over there are taking the position that hosted software has the same benefits as modern native cloud applications. One of the posters says "Citrix has become a pretty good technology, you can run its client almost anywhere including things like iPads" - but this just reinforces my point about cloudwashing - if you did open up MAS 90 online within Citrix on your iPad, what you would get is a 1990's Windows XP user interface on your 2011 iPad - and it would be unusable since you don't have a mouse or keyboard. Think about how disappointing this kind of cloudwashing would be for the actual customer who believed the claim that now you can run MAS 90 on your iPad. 

So let's be clear.  The proper term of art for this delivery model is either ASP or Hosted - perhaps you could stretch into on-line. Calling it SaaS and Cloud misrepresent what Sage are really offering and just confuses the market. And it will provide customers just a fraction of the benefits of modern, multi-tenant cloud-native systems.

Let the buyer beware.