What's more important? SaaS vs. S+S
I've spent the week in Redmond doing some research with some teammates. We were looking at a scenario where it was improved due to Software+Services, or S+S.
For those folks who have not heard, S+S is our expanded view of SaaS (Software as a Service). SaaS by itself is not enough - for example, when disconnected from the Internet, how does SaaS improve my application? NOT!
On the flip side, my application hosted on my machine is not enough either. I can almost always find a way that an app is improved by utilizing services "in the cloud". So, our industry is in a paradigm shift. It's a subtle difference, but S+S is important. SOA is important - but it's not the final destination. SaaS is important - but it's not the end all model either.
Most folks (including myself) consider PC applications when having this conversation. But, there are other forms of consumption - not just traditional clients like PC's. What about picture frames? HUH?
Hear me out. Digital picture frames are a cool little device - and they are also an application. They started out with a USB port, so one could just plug in a stick of pictures. Last Christmas, I really wanted one of these. It's a very interesting way to show digital pictures.
I recently was given a Momento, a digital picture frame with the standard digital frame features - plus some new ones that I had not considered before. It has WiFi capability so that it can sync wirelessly with a Windows Vista box. Cool! And after some more reading, a Ah-Ha moment. They have a service where my friends and family can upload pictures to an Internet site, and then the the pictures are sync'd to the picture frame. Hey, that is really cool.
Then I started thinking. This is a nice application (the left side of the S+S) that was made better with services (the right side of S+S).
Could SaaS by itself be the application? Sure, the picture frame could be a browser (or some other consumer) that just reads some data source out there in the cloud. But, what happens if the cloud is not there today? No pictures, and that's not cool. Therefore, SaaS could not by itself be the solution. It took both sides (S+S) to allow the application to provide a better value over just being a picture frame. That's the beauty of S+S!
P.S. - Microsoft has proven to be one of the big voices of SaaS. Consider our MSDN Architecture SaaS site or even the Wikipedia SaaS page. It's an important part of our future - for example, our Live Services. (Thanks to the SaaS Amigos and Christof for the education).
One last point - the SaaS Amigos have been working hard to consider the different ways SaaS has to work. Recently, they created the Litware HR reference application to continue their thought leadership on S+S. Check this out to see how a client application could work in a pure SaaS environment. It has some thought provoking features like how a client deals with tenant provisioning and metadata. Check it out!