SAAS
by Gerald Trites

Software as a Service (SAAS) is an approach that in our current recession has gained some traction. Essentially, SAAS involves outsourcing applications to a service provider who develops and maintains the application. An organization can run its data through the application over the internet and obtain much of the output it wants. As with any outsourcing activity, SAAS frees up valuable resources to work on the most critical aspects of the organizational information systems, without getting bogged down in development or maintenance activities on systems that are othersise less important but simply need attention. With the scarcity of resources inherent in a recession, SAAS is a natural direction for many companies.

Also, SAAS is a significant step towards the much heralded cloud computing, which involves having significant chunks of an organization's system on the interenet. So far, despite the hype, the cloud has not yet formed for most companies.

SAAS, however, is being adopted. In a recent article in Computerworld, four companies that adopted SAAS are interviewed. All are happy with their decision. All mention the kinds of pros and cons that one would expect with adopting applications that are not unique to the company, not fully customized. But all enjoy the new freedom to apply their resources to areas they consider to be of the greatest strategic importance, which has got to be a major advantage of SAAS.