SaaS, Services and Offshoring
These days anything with a ‘services’ moniker sells….and not surprisingly we are hearing a lot more on SaaS : Software as a Service.
Charlie Bess in the EDS blog muses “Will 2007 be the year of SaaS?” The new moniker certainly has its followers. Martin Langedijk writes
“We all have been taught by our parents from a young age that sharing is a good thing! Software as a Service (SaaS) is based on the principle of sharing; in this case the sharing of resources, computer hardware, knowledge and most importantly the sharing of cost.“
Flavors of SaaS has been around the industry as far back as we can remember, with a couple of trends firming up over the past few years:
Application service provider (ASP) : A licensing fee and a monthly fee are separate and are paid to the maker of the software and to the hoster of the software.
Software on-demand : In software-on-demand type of hosting, there is no division between licensing and hosting fees, and there is little or no customization of software for customers.
I was exchanging notes on this topic with a few peers at Infosys on this, and Freddi Gyara wrote back:
I’ll take the liberty to indulge in some personal examples – In ’97, I worked on some programs for a company for Dendrite. They provide a CRM (the term wasn’t coined as yet) solution specifically for Pharmas. They host the entire server infrastructure (and in those days banks of modems) and undertake the installations of management of fat clients. They used to call it “managed software” in those days.
Similarly, Srinivas J. takes a developer view on SaaS to explore what it would mean:
More than ever the interface to service becomes critical. OO-SOA-SaaS the stress on proper interfaces increases. Since so far in core business areas this has been our Achilles heel in most projects, now more than ever design of interfaces becomes critical. Teams will need good functional members who can abstract the functionality enough for architects/designers to create interfaces or more likely the architects will need to understand functionality deep enough to abstract them.
He also muses that with SaaS, Frameworks would mature to a point where varied deployment modes can be done in a non intrusive way.
Now, Managed software has been around for a while, right? So, what is all the hoopla over SaaS?
. . . Unless we decided to add offshoring as a twist. Software services – development, maintenance, testing etc – continues to move offshore. And if Software is being viewed as a services, what about Offshoring Software Services…
Well, we just would have to come up with another acronym for this, right?
