Software as a service (SaaS)

This is the newest coinage of the term which is making a new wave now with big companies like IBM hosting exclusive seminars for it. Idea-wise and technically there is nothing new here. It is simply the culmination of the software evolving from a provider providing one-size-fits-all product to a more collaborative connective world where each provider provides a solution and everything falls nicely into place with each other. 'Live and let live'.

The sops offered are for CTOs and CIOs. Lesser maintenance headaches, no need to go up on the application upgrade treadmill, not to bother about compatibility and adaptability and in some ways, the best of breeds put together.

Athough ASPs and On-demand hosting are cousins to SaaS, theer are subtle differences. SaaS is loosely based on SOA where you can have services (a la products) talk to each other at different levels. It could be at raw API level, architecture level or application level. All the usual demons of integration has to be planned in advance and addressed such as security, service policies (which by itself can be a service), accounting and autherization, platform dependencies...etc.

SaaS modelled application can be hosted or could be on-premise. The licensing and pricing models and rules would be different from what we have today.
Web developers today are still not trained on technologies such as BPEL to readily develop SaaS based services. Most developers would be happy to integrate services/apps using plain old XML and HTTP. And again, most old software cannot be thrown away for want of SaaS. So, the trend would be to develop wrappers around them and 'somehow' make them a service that others can discover, register and use.

I saw a cynic's post calling SaaS as 'Same old software as service'. For those of us who know Hindi, SaaS means mom-in-law and I guess this is closest to it's meaning. 'Put up with it'!Software as a service (SaaS)

8 terabyte desktop? For whom?

I just read this piece of news: 8 Terabytes Desktop

It is like you can never have too much of the goodies! With such a large disk space on my desktop, I can have 'anything' I want stored on that. One of the first obvious advantages is that I can store videos, movies, arhcive literally everything and will 'never need to delete but just sort' - a la gmail.

But, think about it. This might be great for a student or a graphic designer who would need to store loads of data who works from one single place. But what about the regular IT pro? An IT pro's profile is like this. He/She travels from home to office and back everyday and sometimes to different offices within the country or outside his/her home countey. And sometimes to other destinations on travel. So, how would he/she efficiently use the TBs of info which is situated on his desktop at one office? Will this massive data storage be augmented by massive network bandwidths, by massive backup and recovery strategies?

To me, an ideal environment would be like this. I would stash away the laptop and any dependency with the hard disk out there. I would log on to the internet - from home, office, airport, from my car (car can have a light weight network computer), from my hotel and probably from general travel lounges across the world without being bothered about disk space, backup, RAID and security.

To me, internet bandwidth and availability are much more useful than terabytes of storage on a PC.