The SaaS Revolution
Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 2:25PM SaaS may sound an awful lot like ASP when you look at the general perceived notion of what SaaS is, but there are many key differentiating factors. ASP's of the late 90's and Dot.Com boom were applications taken online that really never should have been there. These were applications that were not designed to be hosted, distributed solutions, but merely traditional applications that became hosted. Most failed and disappeared (with lots of VC money).
SaaS solutions are applications built and designed to be hosted as services. They are typically built by experts in the areas, and their feature set is one that is best accomplished through an online solution. The most obvious and successful implementation of SaaS is SalesForce.com. And if you haven't used SF and have anything to do with sales, I highly recommend it.
With all the press surrounding SaaS many organizations have prepared solutions or products. In considering a software solution, companies should take a look at both on-premise and service based software solutions. When making this consideration I recommend you read a paper recently published by the SIIA.
I also happen to be one of the writers of this paper.
Reader Comments (1)
Here's another link to an article about this paper: http://www.govtech.net/magazine/channel_story.php/101201">Link