Although there is a feeling that this is very new territory, businesses looking into this technology should realize that Web hosts, in particular, have been offering these services for at least ten years. The biggest part of these offerings were almost transparent: the actual hosting of Web sites and the serving of Web pages. Sometimes, they also offered applications as an adjunct to these services. Then, they were called Application Service Providers.That name has now gone out of vogue, and is being replaces by Software as a Service. SaaS has the following general properties:
network-based access to, and management of, commercially available (i.e., not custom) software
activities that are managed from central locations rather than at each customer's site, enabling customers to access applications remotely via the Web
application delivery that typically is closer to a one-to-many model (single instance, multi-tenant architecture) than to a one-to-one model, including architecture, pricing, partnering, and management characteristics
centralized feature updating, which obviates the need for downloadable patches and upgrades.
If these sound familiar, that’s because much of the buzz around Web 2.0 is made up of pretty much these same characteristics, and you have undoubtedly run across them as a part of your personal surfing.
So as you read about Microsoft slugging it out with Google, Oracle, and all of the rest of the computing-in-a-cloud vendors, bear in mind that SaaS is just part of a much bigger, much older concept that you think. It has already been tried and found to work. You see it every night as you visit your favorite social sites. All that is happening now is that the really big players are trying to hitch a ride and make some money from an old idea.
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