Friday, March 24, 2006

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)

No comments: