The outsourcing model which led to the “on-demand” “as a service” model, has taken off with increasing adoption of cloud-computing and mobility. What started out with the SaaS – software as a service model, has now diversified into several other services.
Indeed, cloud computing has come to rest on three of these as its core pillars:
SaaS: Software as a Service PaaS: Platform as a Service IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service Differentiating SaaS, PaaS and IaaS:
I attended the Business Technology Summit in Bangalore last week – 3rd and 4th November. There were 3 tracks on cloud computing, Service Oriented Architecture and Business Intelligence, and I chose a mix of sessions across each.
**Overall impression:**The BT Summit was heavily focused on cloud computing with half of second day having a deep dive into Amazon’s EC2 cloud offering, and several keynotes. SOA and web services, REST and similar architectural sessions were interspersed but definitely not a first-class citizen.
SaaS has taken off in a big way in the past few years. And BI has not been lagging behind. For leading vendors like BOBJ (an SAP company) or Cognos (an IBM company), it’s going to be close to 2 years now since they started their SaaS BI.
What exactly are the advantages of SaaS over the traditional approach?
Benefits are aplenty, from zero costs of purchasing hardware, hiring of key IT personnel like system administrators and DBAs, to minimal implementation and maintenance costs.
