Successful SaaS Offerings:

• Are full function products, customizable to address customers’ specific business needs;
• Target specific customer subsets rather than broad markets;
  
• Achieve economies by sharing server and storage resources and operations management;
  
• Deliver to browsers or web-aware clients and;
  
• Use specialized partners for hosting and service delivery management.

What you will lose if you do not engage in SaaS

If you’re sitting here in 2009 and are not looking to engage in SaaS, you’re going to lose . .

• 79% of IT managers responding to a recent IDC survey have already purchased or are currently reviewing SaaS offerings
• Over 50% of ISVs now receiving funding are SaaS based.
• According to IDC, SaaS spending reached $4.2 billion in 2004 growing 39% year of year from 2003 and is forecasted to reach over $10.7 billion by 2009.
• According to Gartner, 25% of new business software will be delivered as a service by 2011.
• According to the Yankee Group, SaaS sales will be a $20B market by 2011.

SaaS is a major business opportunity

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
Aldous Huxley

Software-As-A-Service : The opportunity

•SaaS represents a fundamental shift in the software market – from the delivery of products to the delivery of services

•SaaS will be enormously disruptive to the software marketplace with proactive entrants having an opportunity to take a leadership position for which legacy software vendors are not well positioned

•SaaS represents a significant business opportunity for developers to:
–Build “environment-centric” applications that run on a single Operating System, a single Database product, and even a single proscribed server and network environment;
–Move to a recurring revenue model and;
–Acquire customers in a broad geography without local presence.

Software-As-A-Service : A value proposition

SaaS promises to shift operational expense (OpEx) and capital expense (CapEx) from the end-customers to the SaaS provider while reducing time to deployment and improving accessibility.

Software-As-A-Service : A delivery model

A model of software delivery (not a market segment). Software can be delivered to any market segment using this method i.e. consumers, SMB, and large enterprises.

Software-As-A-Service : A model of

A model of software delivery that provides customers access to the software over the network (typically Internet) and frees the customer (the software user) from maintenance, daily technical operations, and support of software.

Business-As-A-Service did you say?

I dont want to introduce a new acronym. There are too many of them out there and it is confusing.
I aim to set a new space of thoughts so that we can ask ourselves questions like what is... how do we... why not... what to do what not to do... to melt business processes and IT solutions as a single Business-As-A-Service paradigm.

Here is what the IBM's Program Director of SOA Requirements in the IBM Software Strategy division said on his blog last summer:

• AaaS - Architecture as a Service
• BaaS - Business as a Service
• CaaS – Computing as a Service
• CRMaaS – CRM as a Service
• DaaS - Data as a Service
• DBaaS – Database as a Service
• EaaS - Ethernet as a Service
• FaaS - Frameworks as a Service
• GaaS - Globalization or Governance as a Service
• HaaS - Hardware as a Service
• IMaaS- Information as a Service
• IaaS – Infrastructure or Integration as a Service
• IDaaS - Identity as a Service
• LaaS - Lending as a Service
• MaaS - Mashups as a Service
• OaaS – Organization or Operations as a Service
• SaaS – Software or Storage as a Service
• PaaS - Platform as a Service
• TaaS – Technology or Testing as a Service
• VaaS - Voice as a Service

I'm going to add another one: BlaaS (Blog as a Service)!