IT industry veterans are familiar with the application service provider (ASP) concept. The idea is that a business software company, or its designated partner, hosts an enterprise software offering for end-user IT organizations. This eliminates the need for IT to plan, deploy, support and modify the software in-house.
While the ASP concept has always seemed like a good idea, it never really took off. Now, we're hearing about the same concept with a new name: software as a service (SaaS), a phenomenon whose poster child is Salesforce.com. Is SaaS just hype, or is something really going on here? And if there is fuel behind these flames, what's different? Why has a model that languished for a decade suddenly gained steam?
It is clear an emerging industry is quietly but steadily gaining ground and that SaaS may be on track to change the face of enterprise computing. Salesforce.com CEO Jim Steele believes the SaaS market will represent 25 percent of the software delivery marketplace revenue within four years. If this is true, SaaS will have an enormous impact on the way IT does business, and on the fortunes of enterprise software companies.
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