Boris Evelson tweeted a fine question yesterday morning, but it’s too easy: how to define Saas? If he’s going to all that trouble, why not also define Saas’s younger siblings: platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service. To be a real hero, though, he has to take on the real pain: how to pronounce “Iaas” and “Paas.”
Hi Ted, I posted some thoughts (and resources) on all things cloud here:
http://cloudintegration.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/idc-updates-cloud-services/
More often than not I’m seeing “the cloud” defined with SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS as the key layers. The trouble is that IaaS (public and private clouds) are getting all of the attention right now and SaaS vendors (multitenant, web-based, easy to try/buy applications) are reacting by jumping on the cloud bandwagon. Similarly, “hosted” software vendors are now running on Amazon and trying to claim all of the historical SaaS benefits, when really it’s all about IT resource utilization and cost savings.
I like the post from Roman Stanek today called, “Please don’t let the cloud ruin SaaS.”
http://roman.stanek.org/2009/10/01/please-dont-let-the-cloud-ruin-saas/
Amen