I have written in this blog before about ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS). I recently rediscovered Phil Wainewright who I used to read regularly at ASPnews.com; I am now reading his ZDNet.com Software as Services blog, and I have just picked up on a great abbreviation he devised earlier this year: SoSaaS. Standing for Same Old Software, as a Service, he uses the term to describe:
"Any vendor that takes their existing software and simply delivers it as an online service … their on-demand offering will inevitably be much slower, less flexible and more expensive than rivals that have rearchitected their applications afresh for the on-demand model."
Already, Microsoft has come in for some Wainewright criticism in relation to its CRM application, and I expect they won’t the last. Other traditional software vendors will surely try to pull the wool over their customers’ eyes by applying an "on-demand hosted" label to an existing product, perhaps to buy time as they try to develop a completely new SaaS solution, but they may still face problems if they don’t also transform some of their sales and customer support processes to suit the new paradigm.
1 comment
I like the new gen SaaS, but Man there is a lot of heat out there on the Same Old Software, as if it was bad or something. There are a whole lot of things you can’t do with new On Demand applications versus what you CAN do with the Apps being dubbed SoSaaS. For one thing Speed, and another, integrating with applications that have zillions of vertical industry users on other apps that are not going to be available to the New On Demand Generation any time soon.