Known as On Demand or Software as a Service (SaaS), this area of technology is fascinating to me. A few years ago, it was known as ASP (application service provider) or hosted applications. Now it has a new buzzword and although some of the architecture has changed, the idea hasn’t. And is there really a big difference between SaaS and outsourcing your server and application infrastructure to a 3rd party?
Anyway, the world of www.netsuite.com and www.salesforce.com now have entire eco-systems of other companies and applications surrounding them and they are pushing into the enterprise space, which for a long time, resisted the thought of having their IT infrastructure offsite. The great thing is that it means a business can get systems up and running very quickly with minimal capital expenditure.
