On Demand IT Service
In today’s world, every company is looking at different ways to reduce their operating costs to improve their profitability. To do so, they have to adept quickly with the changing environment.
A business can improve its internal operation when it is able to adapt to emerging technological trends to reduce operational cost and ultimately improve the service the company provides to its clients. Those businesses that are unable to adapt to these new trends would end up spending more money for their operations.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of those new concepts that would help a business to reduce overhead cost that is associated with managing software installed and maintained on the servers and on client workstations. Software as a Service, also known as Software on Demand helps in quick deployment of different software used in different companies that are running, using certain types of business model for its operation.
The concept of Software as a Service started in 1998 with the development of the concept of hosted software space when it was first used in a commercial application. Initially, these Saas applications allowed Web based access to software through a subscription from a SaaS Vendor, instead of the traditional approach of buying a licensed copy of the software for use.
This kind of licensing model encourages a software vendor to restrict the use of their software by clearly defining how and when the client could use the software. The End User License Agreement of such software would precisely specify how the application could be used.
Conventionally, any software is installed in a workstation by using an installation CD. But, in Saas, this concept has been completely done away with. There is no installation of software is involved and the customers are granted full access to the application from their desktop computer.
By using SaaS, a personal computer turns into what is commonly known as “thin client”. Most of the computer operations are executed on the vendor’s server machine that is located at a remote data center. Such an application turns the personal computer into a client and the vendor provides software on demand to this client. This is the basic concept applied in SaaS.
At the beginning, the concept was not very popular and very few companies responded positively to this concept. But, companies that used SaaS reaped a lot of benefit by adopting this computing model. This has made this concept more and more popular amongst many companies around the world.
One of the most important reason for adopting this model is that it leads considerable saving on IT staff as well as time spent on computer operations. This is one of the reasons of increased popularity of SaaS.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 11:22 am and is filed under IT Support. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.