You make the statement that "Software as a Service won't be viable until the Internet is more reliable and more interactive."
However, the SaaS market is already established and growing very rapidly, as many companies are diving in. You may want to check your facts, as Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, etc. all have SaaS being at least 30% of the software provisioning market by the year 2010. And already, the SaaS industry is in the billions and growing out of control.
Software as a Service has a huge upside for businesses. You may want to read and understand research that's being published by Gartner, Forrester, etc.
Software as a Service (SaaS) means an entirely new business model that allows businesses to outsource large pieces of IT to companies that provide such services in the form of a "utility". In other words a business leader can now go directly to a SaaS firm and buy software solutions right through the internet, for very low costs and with very high ease of use. This means the business doesn't have to incur the costs of owning and managing its own software. I think the vision of SaaS is pretty clear...
No more buying, installing, and managing your own software
No more buying, installing, and managing your own hardware
No more dedicated IT headcount
No more owning and managing of your own data centers
No more long rollout cycles
Because everything is web-based, people can connect from anywhere in the world
Etc.
If you think about it, this is exactly what business leaders want, too. Just like businesses were able to outsource benefits, payroll, accounting, phone service, power, gas, etc., they can now also outsource software provisioning and management.
If you want to see some good examples, take a look at:
One thing that I think is amazing about all of this is that it makes a great deal of sense. No business owner in their right mind wants to have dedicated IT organizations, especially when they're not in the business of IT. SaaS allows businesses to just connect to someone else's IT organization and infrastructure and use their's, at a small fraction of the cost. Pretty cool concept, actually.
I can say that we use multiple different SaaS solutions and we love them. They save us a fortune in IT costs. They eliminate all the time it used to take us to deal with IT organizations. We get better solutions. And, it beats having to roll everything out and manage it all, ourselves.
If you don't like SaaS and are looking for excuses against it, you're probably an IT person that's afraid of losing your job because of SaaS. The people that like SaaS realize that they can give their businesses far more IT with better solutions for far less of an investment and in a fraction of the time.
I've seen this platform, too, but we don't use it, yet. We're trying to evaluate how to roll it out in the next few months. I was kind of surprised at how much they cover.
I saw the CEO of this company give a lecture at Princeton, about a month ago, on the topic of SaaS and its impact on how companies buy and use software. His name is Frank Guerino. He covered some pretty interesting stuff on how the world was moving to SaaS and on the specific technologies that are being used and made available. I especially like the Social Network Analsys stuff they're doing. I think he's right, I think the world is definitely starting to move in that direction and I'd like to see more articles on SaaS, in the future. I think businesses have already started moving in that direction but developers are way behind.
- Diane
Slashdot Mirror
This is ridiculous.
You make the statement that "Software as a Service won't be viable until the Internet is more reliable and more interactive."
However, the SaaS market is already established and growing very rapidly, as many companies are diving in. You may want to check your facts, as Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, etc. all have SaaS being at least 30% of the software provisioning market by the year 2010. And already, the SaaS industry is in the billions and growing out of control.
Diane
Software as a Service (SaaS) means an entirely new business model that allows businesses to outsource large pieces of IT to companies that provide such services in the form of a "utility". In other words a business leader can now go directly to a SaaS firm and buy software solutions right through the internet, for very low costs and with very high ease of use. This means the business doesn't have to incur the costs of owning and managing its own software. I think the vision of SaaS is pretty clear...
- No more buying, installing, and managing your own software
- No more buying, installing, and managing your own hardware
- No more dedicated IT headcount
- No more owning and managing of your own data centers
- No more long rollout cycles
- Because everything is web-based, people can connect from anywhere in the world
- Etc.
If you think about it, this is exactly what business leaders want, too. Just like businesses were able to outsource benefits, payroll, accounting, phone service, power, gas, etc., they can now also outsource software provisioning and management.If you want to see some good examples, take a look at:
- http://www.traverseit.com/
- http://www.salesforce.com/
- http://www.netsuite.com/
- http://www.37signals.com/
One thing that I think is amazing about all of this is that it makes a great deal of sense. No business owner in their right mind wants to have dedicated IT organizations, especially when they're not in the business of IT. SaaS allows businesses to just connect to someone else's IT organization and infrastructure and use their's, at a small fraction of the cost. Pretty cool concept, actually.I can say that we use multiple different SaaS solutions and we love them. They save us a fortune in IT costs. They eliminate all the time it used to take us to deal with IT organizations. We get better solutions. And, it beats having to roll everything out and manage it all, ourselves.
If you don't like SaaS and are looking for excuses against it, you're probably an IT person that's afraid of losing your job because of SaaS. The people that like SaaS realize that they can give their businesses far more IT with better solutions for far less of an investment and in a fraction of the time.
Have fun,
Diane
I've seen this platform, too, but we don't use it, yet. We're trying to evaluate how to roll it out in the next few months. I was kind of surprised at how much they cover. I saw the CEO of this company give a lecture at Princeton, about a month ago, on the topic of SaaS and its impact on how companies buy and use software. His name is Frank Guerino. He covered some pretty interesting stuff on how the world was moving to SaaS and on the specific technologies that are being used and made available. I especially like the Social Network Analsys stuff they're doing. I think he's right, I think the world is definitely starting to move in that direction and I'd like to see more articles on SaaS, in the future. I think businesses have already started moving in that direction but developers are way behind. - Diane