Jim Morris's Thought of the Week (or month, or year, ...)
Friday, September 29, 2006
SaaS
SaaS is pronounced as “sass.” Not, as you might think from the spelling, “sauce.”
“SaSS” might be a better acronym. Rather than “Software as a Service”, it could mean “Service as the Savior of Software.”
The combination of the bust, open source, and off-shoring has made the software community glum. Larry Ellison declared it a goner and the president of Oracle Online, Tim Chou, wrote a book called The End of Software.
Now comes the SaaS movement, formerly called the ASP business, complete with its own conference, SaaSCon, keynoted by none other than Tim Chou and attended by several of the people for whom you think SaaS was not good – Microsoft, IBM, and many enterprise software consultants. Notably absent were many of the companies that are making a bundle from service – Google, eBay, Amazon, etc.
Let’s be clear – a web service solution that replaces a licensed product is going to be much cheaper, so this movement is really about reducing software delivery costs, just as Nicholas Carr suggested in “IT Doesn’t Matter.” There may be wonderful, innovative things coming later, but SaaS is really a cover story for a significant retrenchment of the software industry.
posted by Jim Morris @ 10:09 AM
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