What does SaaS mean (to me)
I've been thinking about this software-as-a-service thing for many, many years now (prior to joining MSFT I wrote one of the first internet chat applications with my buddy Scott, and later on I worked on the leading internet-delivered skills assessment system). Clearly there are different camps and that's a good thing. It means we understand that there are different classes of needs and desires.
The recent push toward social networking (hmm…) has its roots in the individual or casual group. That is, social applications are about connecting people and groups based less on their work affiliations and more on those intangibles: likes, wants, and desire to belong. This aspect of the new internet has bled nicely into other application spaces, like the one that I work in.
My work for the last few years has been around creating great experiences in line of business applications. These applications are usually known more by their acronyms: CRM, ERP, ERM, HRM, etc. It's also interesting to note that these applications traditionally are not productivity applications such as Office, but are more about helping to automate certain business operations.
It's this concept of user though that made me start thinking hard about how social networking applications are changing the face of LOB applications. For the last year my team has been doing research into SaaS LOB applications to understand why customers would consider purchasing them instead of traditional on-premise software. There are a few easily guessable and recognizable patterns in the purchase decision such as security, cost-cutting, and availability. These were aspects that we assumed customers were looking for and we weren't overly surprised to find them.
What was surprising, at least to a number of people on the team (I'm not saying I knew this, but I suspected it) was that customers were beginning to purchase SaaS because they expected to collaborate seamlessly with their trusted partners. This was the basis for the work that my previous team was doing last summer and fall. What's interesting about it is that it goes against the core design of (nearly) every LOB application ever built.
I think of SaaS in terms of some additional intangibles: collaboration, community, connectedness, completeness, and changeability (the 5 Cs for now). For me it's not about multi-tenant architectures, or feature sets, or any of the other things that we as architects typically worry about. It's about how to create great experiences for businesses. I'll talk more about the 5 Cs over the next week or so and try to explain how this new web is having an impact on the status quo.