The verbal sparring between Software as a Service (SaaS) providers and their traditional counterparts continued this week as NetSuite took a swipe at ERP market leader SAP. Technology correspondent Jon Wilcox reports.

The Cloud software company ramped up its "Anything you can do, I can do better" campaign with a news release [1] announcing the latest companies to subscribe to its integrated, web-hosted suite.

It’s fair to say the companies (including the St Louis-based Schaeffer Manufacturing Company) are far from internationally renowned names. The announcement is more an opportunity for NetSuite to reveal favourable stats.

Quoting research carried out by UK-based Macro4, the company that styles itself as the "antidote for the high cost and complexity of SAP" this time targeted its rival's upgrade processes. According to the report, 90% of respondents in the UK, France, and Spain that use SAP “admitted that performing upgrades was a challenge”.

The report also revealed the biggest complaints made by SAP customers: the time that upgrades consume (mentioned by 73%), the complexity involved (60%), and the staffing resources involved (50%).

The recession has proved to be a positive time for SaaS providers, with Cloud services offering companies lower start-up costs compared to traditional on-premise vendors. It’s a war of words, pitting the likes of SAP and Sage against relative newcomers like NetSuite and KashFlow – and those words seems to be growing ever louder.