on life, business, technology & all that

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.