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SaaS pioneers date back to the 1960s so we have decades of knowledge that's floating around. More recently, during the 1990s, we had Application Service Provide

SaaS pioneers date back to the 1960s so we have decades of knowledge that's floating around. More recently, during the 1990s, we had Application Service Provider that tackled the same issues. Imagine being IBM during those very early years trying to sell the idea of remote computing - it must have been an utterly alien concept to most organizations. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service

VLM 14y ago
I worked at a IBM Mainframe shop in the early 90s. It wasn't so alien because back then there was a semi-infinite smooth graduation from completely internal to completely outsourced and that demarc line seemed in continuous flux with seemingly every customer. Also moving from different levels of inside/outside was pretty smooth and basically user transparent. We owned our own hardware (some was leased) and more or less supported ourselves but also had an onsite IBM CE more or less full time. We also outsourced our disaster recovery to two different far away places. So it wasn't utterly alien at all, we just kinda smoothly took over or gave away responsibilities. Also decisions were made by tech people with tech people, more or less, rather than businessmen. So there was not much of a knowledge disparity. The businessmen set a budget and a goal, but the techies decided the "right place" to store bits. Conceptually now you can move from local mail servers to gmail and back as you please, but its not nearly as end-user transparent or as easy and fast as SAAS was back in the day. Maybe someday your email server will be a vmware or whatever image and you'll decide to run it locally on your own hardware or upload it to a private server or a cloud and it'll just transparently "work" but we've got a long way to go before we (in general) reach the level of what mainframes did decades ago. Another good model for how SAAS worked in the old days was telecom after ma bell broke up and before everything re-merged back into a couple big players. Not unusual for a private line ckt to flow thru 4 or 5 companies all with different demarc points and responsibilities. Things were a little more standardized in the mainframe world 20 years ago than in general now.

VLM 14y ago

I worked at a IBM Mainframe shop in the early 90s. It wasn't so alien because back then there was a semi-infinite smooth graduation from completely internal to completely outsourced and that demarc line seemed in continuous flux with seemingly every customer. Also moving from different levels of inside/outside was pretty smooth and basically user transparent. We owned our own hardware (some was leased) and more or less supported ourselves but also had an onsite IBM CE more or less full time. We also outsourced our disaster recovery to two different far away places. So it wasn't utterly alien at all, we just kinda smoothly took over or gave away responsibilities. Also decisions were made by tech people with tech people, more or less, rather than businessmen. So there was not much of a knowledge disparity. The businessmen set a budget and a goal, but the techies decided the "right place" to store bits. Conceptually now you can move from local mail servers to gmail and back as you please, but its not nearly as end-user transparent or as easy and fast as SAAS was back in the day. Maybe someday your email server will be a vmware or whatever image and you'll decide to run it locally on your own hardware or upload it to a private server or a cloud and it'll just transparently "work" but we've got a long way to go before we (in general) reach the level of what mainframes did decades ago. Another good model for how SAAS worked in the old days was telecom after ma bell broke up and before everything re-merged back into a couple big players. Not unusual for a private line ckt to flow thru 4 or 5 companies all with different demarc points and responsibilities. Things were a little more standardized in the mainframe world 20 years ago than in general now.