I came upon this article on Silicon.com recently which quotes a Gartner study indicating that by he year 2011 SaaS will account for 25% of new business software revenues and also stating that

"No provider offers the functionality capability or process management capabilities on par with on-premise software to support end-to-end cross departmental business flows." Interesting.. and a challenge I think!

Now I have to be honest here, I was expecting this to be a little higher... the market is about 5% today and we're only expecting a 5% growth per year?? When I see headlines showing Salseforce.com half-million user milestone and Google's provision of web-based applications I am left with the following question (one which I've posed before!)

What do people mean when they talk about Software as a Service?

I think that the ambiguity in the definition is large enough to allow discussions about the same 'topic' to actually reference significantly different functional areas. A case in point would be the Salesforce.com's application versus a hosted ERP solution accessed by Terminal Services / Citrix... both fall into the broad definition of SaaS but are not the same at all.

If we think of SaaS as the facility to subscribe to an application instead of having to buy it and the associated hardware/tech support/etc, Salesforce isn't SaaS. If we think of SaaS as a web-based application solution providing desired feature functionality at a controllable cost , the Terminal Services / Citrix ERP application isn't SaaS.

In an effort to make my own life a little easier I'm going to start qualifying the SaaS I'm discussing as web-based or hosted applications.

J.