Software > SaaSEssentials

Telstra launched the first stage of its online software platform this week, rolling out security, email, CRM, business productivity and backup solutions via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Spending on SaaS (software as a service) enterprise applications will top US$6.4 billion this year, a 27 percent jump over 2007, and will catapult to US$14.8 billion by 2012, according to the research firm Gartner.

The ongoing global economic crisis may spark a pricing war in the SaaS (software as a service) arena, according to a major vendor in the space.

The number of hosted e-mail seats will grow by nearly 40 percent in the next four years, with small-to-midsize businesses contributing to a portion of the boost, according to a new study by The Radicati Group.

When it came time for Washington, D.C., to create a new intranet for city employees, spending US$4 million on a site based on proprietary portal software just didn't seem like a good idea to CTO Vivek Kundra. But using Google Apps did, he said in an interview Tuesday.

We're all too familiar with outages in Google's Gmail, Salesforce.com and the RIM BlackBerry network. Recent failures by Apple MobileMe, Jott and Cuil online-delivered software demonstrate that software-as-a-service -- or Software+Services, as Microsoft would call it -- isn't just a matter of putting your software up on the Internet, gathering users and declaring your Version 1.0 ready so you can start charging for services. The three recent examples of MobileMe, Jott and Cuil clearly demonstrate other major pitfalls in trying to deliver online software. Are all online software services destined to repeat these same mistakes, or will we learn from the mistakes of others? I certainly hope the latter.

Although some would trace back the roots of software as a service to mainframe timesharing, what we would now call SaaS, or on-demand computing, is really experiencing its second coming.

Google has added a video sharing component to its Apps Premier suite of hosted communication and collaboration software, betting that companies will find it useful for a variety of workplace uses.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff swung through Boston Tuesday to tout his company's "platform-as-a-service" model, which lets developers create and deliver business applications over the Web without installing any software.

Nine out of ten software-as-a-service providers will rely on open source software by 2010 to save money, but the cost savings likely won't be passed onto customers, Gartner says in a new research note.

The Free Software Foundation has published a new open-source software license aimed at developers whose code is used for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.