Sunday, May 16, 2010

SaaS - Disruptive but Positive !


My interview on this topic appeared on CIOL last week.  The full version  is available at http://www.ciol.com/Enterprise/Enterprise/Interviews/SaaS-Disruptive-but-Positive/135989/0/

Disruptive means "Break through traditional teachings to truth and the word of life".  Disrupt(verb) means 'to interrupt the normal course' or 'to through into disorder'. (courtesy:  http://www.webster.com/ )

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software as a Service (SAAS) are disruptive.   In general, end users use only 20% of the features of any software product 80% of the time.  And in how many instances have we used 100% of the features?  The answer is an obvious one.  But the fact is that we pay for the entire product.  Annual support and maintenance overheads prevail throughout the lifecycle!  This trend required some disruption !   SOA and SaaS came in to disrupt.

SOA and SaaS have emerged strongly to promote 'Pay-Per-Use' model.   Almost all product companies do have strong focus on releasing new versions of their products that support such paradigms. In order to leverage the benefits of these technologies the volume of hosted software licenses and related business models in the IT landscape will increase. This will benefit several small and medium business.   They will be able to avail niche products by means of transaction based license fee or similar models. This is a disruptive but positive trend.

This trend in disruption extended to infrastructure provisioning as well.  Now, businesses can purchase 'on-demand' infrastructure for a limited period of use and thus can save loads of costs involved in hardware and software procurement.  'On-demand provisioning' is an application of Cloud Computing.   An anology for this is the hotel industry that provides for booking a desired room configuration for a limited period and attracts customers with several offerings with discounts.    As one may think, 'Cloud' is not just a retirement home for 'end-of-life' 'non-ctirical' applications and data!

We could not have thought about SaaS two decades ago!  It has emerged over the past 5 years or so.   Is n't SaaS an impressive disruption?

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