Value of Software As a Service
Last night i was at a regional software technology executive gathering. A few conversations related to software as a service(SAAS) brought me to think a little deeper of the value of SAAS.
Dennis Goulet from Progress Software mentioned how well Salesforce.com is working out for them – that's apparently after some previous humbling SFA implementation experiences. Jo Hoppe from Pega Systems and a few others concurred SAAS as “great”.
The interesting thing is that CIOs view SAAS beyond its deployment and administration advantages. A major value is what's being called as “data coherence”. It essentially refers to the fact that SAAS enables coherent data accessible to anyone (with appropriate authentication of course). Before SAAS, each department maintains its own data, used by its own app, within its own databases. It would be a painful process if marketing wants to connect to sales data. Data is locked down by different databases, servers, networks and administrative personnel – in isolated data islands. With SAAS, all the data is available over the Internet, from a central repositary. All what required is to get appropriate credential. Data is coherent and available.
Now the interesting ramification: given that data is coherenctly available, how to use data? Obviously there are lots of apps to be written in order for these data to really create value to business users. ->how to cost effectively build and deploy this kind of applications? Wouldn't the natural solution be some sort of rich internet application platform?
Obviously Salesforce.com still has lots of work to do 
(This line is added to test trackback from about.com)
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Anonymous
