Comments on: Everything you always wanted to know about SaaS but were afraid to ask

By: William Vambenepe — “Freeing SaaS from Cloud”: slides and notes from Cloud Connect keynote

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:44:37 +0000

[...] humans and programmatic access via APIs.). To illustrate this point, I summarized the content of this blog entry. No need to repeat it here. The bottom line is that any distinction between SaaS and POWA (Plain [...]

By: Thomas Lukasik

Thomas Lukasik — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:31:41 +0000

IMHO, the ability to understand the true nature of ‘SaaS’ (and “know it when you see it”) only requires that you go back far enough — prior to the very short-lived “ASP” era. Back to the days when there were no real alternatives to taking the very risky route of selecting, buying and installing a blister-packed, COTS software product and then finding out that the software didn’t work the way you needed or expected it to — in which case the “software” became “shelfware”.

SasS exists to solve that problem. If it doesn’t solve that problem, then it’s not SaaS, and if it does, then it is.

Just my 2 cents.

TJL

By: William (@vambenepe on Twitter)

William (@vambenepe on Twitter) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:18:25 +0000

Mike,

Are you trying to trip me, posting your comment right after I slam the hammer on the auction? ;-)

Jokes aside, I agree that #10 is one of the most promising, but it’s not perfect. By this definition, a web-based calculator is now SaaS because I could use calc.exe instead? And what happens if/when Microsoft and others give up and just stop selling Exchange (and other mail servers) as software because everyone has moved to hosted email? Is hosted email suddenly not SaaS anymore because it doesn’t have a on-premise equivalent? :-)

WRT to “your data, their software”, I can’t push it too far. As a European with stronger expectations on data ownership, I think of pretty much any data I provide on the Web as “my data”. Including the cookies that all the web sites try to put on my browser (and the server-side data that they connect to the cookie). And any comment I leave on a blog. So that makes for a very inclusive definition again. But indeed, data plays a large role and that’s what I was trying to capture in #1 and #2.

While there is no perfect definition, I think the two lines of though you highlight are indeed the most relevant/productive ones.

By: mike fratto

mike fratto — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:43:05 +0000

I think it hinges on #10 because you are using or replacing on-premise with a service. It could be the same software.

I’d add one more criteria though. Their software, your data. Thank of any of the SaaS systems out there. They are processing your data with their software. One without the other doesn’t make sense. You could even use that premise to name travel agencies as POWA because they really aren’t processing your data whereas a CRM does.

By: Simran Narula

Simran Narula — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:16:07 +0000

I believe… you are correct. I also believe that Saas and all such terminology is a marketing jargon. Bigger corporations are using these terms to sell their Web Apps/Enterprise apps at a higher rate than they used to.

Yes, I have read a lot and it has always confused me… and I have not really understood what is the key difference between all these.

A classic example I guess would be:

Business: we need a web solution that does this and that.

Big IT Organization: We would do a SAAS for you!

Business: SAAS ? whats that ?

Big IT Organization : a new form of web software ! that has this and that has
that !!!

Business: ohh great! How much would that cost ?

Big IT Organization : not much, just a million dollar :-)

Business: whtttttt? million dollar ??? isn’t there a cheaper solution ??

Big IT Organization: well then we will have do a POWA for you.. that might not be as efficient as SAAS and might not give you what you want.

Business: :-(

I do not know if I am correct… but this what I have learned