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Being in the software product development we often get questions like how are software product development firms any different from offshore outsourcing firms? What is your differentiation?What do you offer that infosys and wipros do not offer?

These are valid questions but not surprisingly they often come from people who are not looking to innovate a product, people who are looking to innovate a product or service inherently know in their minds a regular software development firm will not fit the bill.

To start with a innovator looking to create a product or service is like rugby player who has the ball in his hand and is running towards the goal post like his life depends on it. And it does.

Only an innovator can understand an innovator. Period.

The major offshore outsourcing companies have been around for decades yet they have never attempted or delivered a product. This in the face of an appreciating rupee and shrinking margins.

There are various factors  that differentiate a outsourced product development firm from a regular software outsourcing house.

We mention the top 10 reasons why an outsourced product development firm is completely different from software outsourcing company.

1. Approach

2. Process

3. Delivery

4. Design

5. Trusted Partners

6. Risk Ability

7. People

8. Project handing

9. Service level agreements

10. Ownership

We will discuss all the points in details in the coming postings. Meanwhile if you would like to provide your point of view feel free to comment and let us know.

SaaS or Software as a service has been around for a decade but never really took off into the mainstream, the main reasons why it never took off were security reasons, reliability & availability, user adoption,  preference of major players to keep SaaS out, technology limitations.

Salesforce.com was the first one to break the barrier to entry into SaaS enterprise space forcing major players like oracle, sap, ibm, microsoft to get on the SaaS bandwagon.

The bigger players had a vested interest in enterprise software remain on legacy systems. few reasons are stated as below.

Since the hardware is shared in SaaS the sale of hardware in the enterprise segment will go down for server makers.

Its easy to sell software to less for more.

Making software available online also means letting the intellectual property in the open for smaller players to immitate the same software and pose a threat by reducing margins in the segment.

SaaS levels the playing field up for smaller player, which is something bigger players will not want.

In a 5 part series we take a look at the history of SaaS, its failures and successes, advantages and disadvantages, technical perspectives and architecture, issues in user adoption and marketing of SaaS and what the future holds.