Confused

I had a great meeting last week in Amsterdam with Treb Ryan, CEO of US based OpSource. They are one of the pioneer SaaS Enablement providers and Microsoft partner for the SaaS Incubation Center program. Treb and I actually met for the first time earlier last month in Bellevue at the Microsoft Hosting Summit. So coincidentally we found out he was coming to Amsterdam (and I was not travelling)...

We talked about what we both see happening in the space of Software Developers moving to the web for delivery of their applications, what these ISVs need from hosting providers and how programs like SaaS On-Ramp and the Incubation Center program can be further refined to help ISVs move.

What was most interesting is our joined conclusion that there is still a lot of confusion on what SaaS is or what it isn't. SaaS in some peoples view is all about Web delivery of an application. Ray Ozzie gave his view last month in a Knowledge@Wharton interview and outlined a generation-1 (web-based) and a generation-2 (hybrid of software AND services). Then there is the On-Demand angle, driving traditional applications into a 'browser experience'.

All in all we both concluded that this part of the industry is still in some sort of confused state ... we need much clearer descriptions if we want to avoid meaning totally different things speaking about SaaS. Phil Wainewright at ZDnet started a poll to find a better word. He is pitching Webware for a pure browser delivered exprience and I like it. Dave Tebutt asks what's in a name and does it really, really care how we call it?

I believe it does matter how we call it. There are too many different models and trends to be captured by only one term. Webware is clear but only covering the browser delivered app part. Software+Services is clear too, it covers the model where you have some piece of software that lives on the users machine and services that ehance the experience. Pointing back to Ray Ozzie's interview he provides some nice and very different examples. Adobe Flash is software (the browser plug-in that is installed on your machine) and services (the code and content that lives on websites). Xbox is another of his examples, with the hardware and the games being enhanced with the Xbox Live services on the net. With those 2 models (Webware & Software+Services) we already can be a lot more specific in talking about ways a software company goes to market and support the end-users. In the hope we avoid being confused next time we speak...