Phil Seeking the True Meaning of SaaS

Following all the noise about what is SaaS in the blogosphere these past few days, Phil as a very good article describing the journey he went through since he did a keynote at the very first ASP conference in 1999.

In his post, Phil talks about Multi-tenancy, Shared services, SOA, Community of interest, Pay as you go and concludes with the fact that SaaS is inadequate as a term. In his words:

SaaS is inadequate as a term to describe the end destination of this journey, which is both less than SaaS, by virtue of what it leaves behind, as well as more than SaaS, on account of what it gains from connecting into the collaborative Internet. Alternative terms already exist — I prefer to talk about on-demand services — so I don't think we need a new buzzword. Essentially, this is just a new spin on business services, which is something we've had since before the advent of the Internet, or even of computing itself.

To tell you the truth I have also been discussing within Microsoft about the right term for this trend. At our recent Strategic Architecture Forum we talked about "Software + Services".

In any case, all this is transient. Do you still remember the IBM e-business ads? Well, e-business as a term is not needed anymore, it is just business. In the future, SaaS or OnDemand or any other moniker will not be needed either, it will just be software.

In the meantine, what is SaaS and the its true meaning will be sought after by many.