It’s Groundhog Day! Yes, time for another clichéd post referring to the 1993 Andie MacDowell movie.

What does Groundhog Day have to do with software and technology? It’s quite simple. We’ve watched the market sing the same cloud song (“I got you babe”) for nearly a decade. Yes, it’s Groundhog Day over and over again without the joy of Sonny and Cher every morning.

We’ve watched one legacy software company after another position their monolithic on-premise offering as-as-service, which is particularly pervasive in commerce. It’s painful to play this same game over and over with no end in sight—and it’s costing organizations millions of dollars and years in implementation, subscription, and upgrade costs and time. Aside from the heavy price tag and time suck, the false promises of on-premise “cloud” software can damage customer experience, stifle business growth and restrict flexibility to adapt to changing market demands.

It’s time to stop the madness.

SaaS, or as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff likes to say ‘real cloud,’ is about much more than selling a subscription contract. While cloud is absolutely a delivery model, the real cloud offers much more—agility and scalability included. Discerning buyers can sniff out a legacy platform offering a reskinned on-premise solution based on three key criteria:

1. Delivery model: A true cloud solution is licensed as a subscription, which helps the CFO and CIO with their CapEx and budget models. It also enables IT to focus on their business; not constraining growth by spending time maintaining a data center. Finally, SaaS means upgrades. Enterprises should expect multiple upgrades each year included in their subscription.

2. Agility: Agility has many meanings. For us, it means speed—quick deployment, fast integrations with existing investments and new services, and more importantly, speed to market when introducing new products, partnerships and business models. Agility isn’t an IT term. It’s a business philosophy.

3. Scalability: Many cloud providers do not offer elastic scaling without additional costs, configuration or orders. Enterprises must trust their partner to scale to meet the demands of the market, and ensure revenue can always flow through the system. SaaS scales with your business, so you’re not encumbered by a hosting provider or team unfamiliar with the application being hosted.

At CloudCraze, we deliver a leading commerce experience, centered around the customer and delivered on an agile, scalable platform—the Salesforce Platform—that allows us to deliver innovation to you. Innovation that is consumable and business forward.

In a world driven by immediate gratification and the consumer, enterprises must have the same expectations of technology partners and delivery models. This is the only way you can effectively provide a customer-centric commerce experience, enable employees to react to changing market demands with immediacy, and take advantage of innovation, integrations and speed-to-market with SaaS.

Follow us to learn more as we publish the myths of the cloud and the power that the real cloud brings to your Enterprise. And share your false-cloud stories with us on social @CloudCraze.