SaaS is Good for the DoD

The Department of Defense, especially the Defense Information Systems Agency is starting to move to a software as a service model for its computing needs. I see this as a good thing but not everybody in the industry is happy about this as evidenced in this article. Not surprising as this will definitely start to hurt their cash cows--big contracts for crappy applications that no one likes to use. I've been working in the public sector for a couple years now and just in those two short years I've seen a lot of this. From a taxpayer's perspective I'm glad to see that the government is starting to wise up. The SaaS model will force the contractors to create good software that people will want to use since the government won't have to pay unless they're actually using it. Obviously some of the contractors are afraid, but those of us who understand this new model see a lot of opportunities here. The SaaS model will still require a lot of good engineering work (though not actually doing the implementation) as well as a strong understanding of the business/domain. Someone's still gotta do this and we all know how understaffed the government is.

SaaS