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

Old School Guys Starting to Move into SaaS

You can tell that SaaS is really taking off when you start to see the old school software guys starting to offer the capabilities of their products through on-demand services. This article in InformationWeek talks about Informatica (a long time vendor of ETL products) offering data integration as an on-demand service to integrate internal enterprise applications with other SaaS vendors such as salesforce.com. This won't be available until third quarter this year. Seems to me like they're a little late to the game. Companies like Bridgewerx have been offering such capabilities for a while now. It will interesting to see what kind of capabilities Informatica's services will offer. Given their ETL background, they'll probably have some pretty good data transformation and cleansing capabilities which could be a competive edge for them over some of the other companies offering this stuff.

SaaS, ETL,
data integration

Excel--The End User Friendly Rich Client for Web Services?

StrikeIron recently announced the ability to integrate web services from their Business Network into Excel. Web services have been lacking an end user-friendly client for a while. Will this announcement from StrikeIron push Excel to fill that gap? We all know that Excel has always been the tool of choice for business analysts. Now that they can directly tap into reusable web services from Excel, maybe we'll really start to see the use of web services as true business services that are reusable by people on the business side instead of just developers.

web services, SaaS, rich clients