> That really depends on how you budget
It depends on how big your budget is. If it's tight, the problem of purchasing expensive licenses at once may be a blocker - bad for the buyer AND the seller!
> This is 100% false, SaaS Opex Spend is FAR FAR FAR less flexible than CAPEX spend in the IT Space, take for example Office 365 Vs ONPrem, with OnPrem I can forgo a Capital expense to upgrade some servers, EOL a SAN disk array a year later, or choose to stick on Office 2016 for another year if needed.
I don't see how this proves that SaaS is not flexible? You also forgot to account for the necessary expenses to run all this On-Prem stuff. You need an expensive team that you pay on a monthly basis --> OPEX
> Now you do not pay your annual licensing fee well your software no longer works
I agree with you that this sucks.
> Still from a highly logical and engineering focus more than a Finance focus I will still look at $100k over 5 years or 20K annual to be the same...
You can look at it this way but that still doesn't make it (not even "highly logical") the same. Sorry.
It depends on how big your budget is. If it's tight, the problem of purchasing expensive licenses at once may be a blocker - bad for the buyer AND the seller!
> This is 100% false, SaaS Opex Spend is FAR FAR FAR less flexible than CAPEX spend in the IT Space, take for example Office 365 Vs ONPrem, with OnPrem I can forgo a Capital expense to upgrade some servers, EOL a SAN disk array a year later, or choose to stick on Office 2016 for another year if needed.
I don't see how this proves that SaaS is not flexible? You also forgot to account for the necessary expenses to run all this On-Prem stuff. You need an expensive team that you pay on a monthly basis --> OPEX
> Now you do not pay your annual licensing fee well your software no longer works
I agree with you that this sucks.
> Still from a highly logical and engineering focus more than a Finance focus I will still look at $100k over 5 years or 20K annual to be the same...
You can look at it this way but that still doesn't make it (not even "highly logical") the same. Sorry.