David Byrne always wanted us all to 'stop making sense' - maybe he was suggesting that there are always pitfalls in every good idea.
There's no doubt that, under certain circumstances, this model is going to favor all parties.
But I wonder what the SLA terms and conditions will be and how much they will alter from customer to customer. And revenue targets?
I can't help thinking that this is a model that, for the time being at least, looks greta on paper but that, in many cases, will hit the barrier that gets in the way of som many good ideas - people....
I guess technically, it's slightly different, because the manufacturer remains the owner of the equipment, but isn't this really just the same thing as vendor financing? Works great for high-margin products, I guess.
The equipment maker gives up its one-time upfront revenue in favor of recurring revenues over the time that its gear gets used. In the you-name-it as a Service world, this model makes strong business sense.
As mentioned, there's risk and reward sharing with the downstream ecosystem, and that brings about interests alignment toward efficiency: the gear maker gets motivated about increasing the ratio of service revenue per equipment life time cost. With conventional model of selling plain hardware for one-time revenue and ongoing support service (+charges for security patches), the equipment vendor was rather rewarded from poor capacity utilization efficiency and operational complexity.
Perhaps "GaaS" model should specifically target providing hardware(-as-a-service) manageable using non-vendor-specific open-standard management interface ala SDN, however with critical hardware level features that are not available from traditional equipment vendors, to provide a superior performance and features in addition to partner/customer friendly business model.
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