Friday, April 17, 2009
There are three types of people in the new technological world, those who know, those who don’t and those who pretent to know. And if you pretend, the easiest way of being caught out is to use an acronym incorrectly, for instance, recently I was asked by a manager, what the 'earl' of the server is (URL). Now U-R-L is one of the those abbreviations that is not pronounced as a word, but as three distinct letters: U - R - L.
So that you don’t make that mistake with the relatively new Software as a Service (SaaS), I can tell you it is pronounced as ‘sass’, not spelt out like S - A - A - S. And you’re going to hear more and more about it in the near future.
The idea of SaaS (and the reason you are going to hear more and more about it) is that you don’t buy a license for your software – instead, you pay when you need it. You also don’t need to install it on a computer or download updates for it, the software is hosted on a remote server and all that is taken care of. You simply access it through the Internet and pay a monthly or yearly subscription to use it. As the internet speeds up and becomes more efficient and reliable, Software as a Service becomes a more viable option for a larger number of applications. In fact, there is virtually no task you do on your computer that could not be done through remotely hosted software.
SaaS has been used now for a long time by niche providers like the makers of Client Relationship Management (CRM) software, Salesforce and Sugar CRM. And probably the largest player in the SaaS market is Google, with their highly effective web statistics software, Google Analytics, their web mail and most recently, their free online document editor and spreadsheet. This is a wonderful, easy to use browser based set of tools that could really be seen as a direct challenge to Microsoft’s domination in this arena.
Website management software; the Content Management System (CMS) that allows you to update your website through a browser interface, is of course a form of SaaS and CMS’s have existed in many different forms for a number of years now. Traditionally, these have been a simple interface with what is called a WYSIWYG editor (pronounced wis-ee-wig) which stands for ‘What You See Is What You Get’. The WYSIWYG looks like a document editing interface and it writes the HTML code for the web page as you create it.
The concept of Software as a Service has recently been embraced by web hosting company Business Catalyst (the creators of our Bloomkit solution) and taken to a new level, where it now forms a complete small business management system online. Business Catalyst have taken the website content management system and combined it with a client relationship management system, a shopping cart and ordering system and a website statistics system like Google analytics.
This means a small business owner can login to one interface and check who has been to their website, new orders for their product or service, communicate with their database of clients and update their blog and website.
The beauty of combining this into one system is that it makes it easy to use and ensures that even technologically challenged people, the people who don’t know and who may have become completely frustrated when they had to log into several different systems, will now perform all the tasks necessary for their business to succeed in today’s technological environment.
And the pretenders? They will just continue to amuse us with their pronounciation of techno acronyms.
Mike Barker
Internet Business Consultant
Read Mike's profile
SlideRocket could be the answer to "death by PowerPoint". It's a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, meaning it's web-based, and a new approach to creating slide presentations. You can create stunning, dynamic presentations, manage them through the online interface, share them securely with others (take advantage of the built-in online meeting functionality) and also generate reports to measure the results.
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