If you read news sites, such as TechCrunch or Mashable, you will get the impression that the B2B (on premise) market is dying and everybody is moving into the Cloud. Even SAP has some offerings in the Cloud. Specially Amazon is pushing the message that companies who are not in the Cloud will loose market shares in future because they are not competitive. But there is difference between Reality and what the Media sites are publishing!
I’m not saying that the Cloud is a bad thing. VersionEye is running on AWS and I’m very satisfied with the Amazon Cloud! But there are many companies with very sensitive data, who care a lot about privacy and they will never move their data into the Cloud. Beside that a Cloud infrastructure is not necessarily cheaper. It always depends.
If you build a new product you have to make a decision. Do you build it as SaaS (Software as a Service) or do you go for the B2B (Business to Business) market? VCs and Investors prefer to invest in SaaS companies these days. But selling a B2B product to big companies can make your company much faster profitable. And the successful vendors for developer tools (GitHub & Atlassian) still make most of their Money with selling licenses to big companies.
B2B is not hyped as much as Cloud, but it’s anyway a huge market!
Open Source License Compliance & Security 