Trends drive our business. In the last couple of years there's a trend around services. Ofcourse there's the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) but not only.
Web services, Software as a Service etc.
It is so trendy to discuss about services, that I read and hear people discuss SaaS and mix it with some other trends like cloud computing, on demand computing etc.
I'd like to explain my view of SaaS, which is totally a business perspective.
One of the main challenges IT has in the last couple of years is to show solid ROI, reduce costs and allow business flexibility and agility.
SaaS provides a way for IT to purchase "software licenses" from its OPEX budget and not from CAPEX. In most firms, this is a dramatic change, allowing a much flexible budget planning and accounting wise brings other values to the firm.
Note, this has nothing to do ofcourse with the software features nor service over the web or not.
Cloud computing takes the software and places it in a remote datacenter, hosted on the web, allowing IT not to deal with purchasing and maintaining this hardware and underlying software. In most cases, cloud computing based software is sold as a service.
On demand is the ability to consume additional licenses / hardware with no extra effort of upgrading or ad-hoc business engagement. This allows flexibility in consuming extra computing power during pick periods.
My next chapter
8 years ago
