Monday, August 4, 2008

Why SaaS needs RIA

Softwares sold under the SaaS model are usually web applications. I say usually because it may not always be the case as SaaS vendor Entellium demonstrated recently.
One of the things that SaaS vendors use to sell is the fact that the software is immediately available and that no install is needed. However desktop installs are now easier than ever and if the desktop application of your competitor is better in terms of UI and/or functionality, the choice will be simple.

Not only your UI should be Rich and easy to use to compete with the desktop equivalent but also to keep support costs as low as possible. Additionnaly, moving some of the processing to the client machine is a good thing in general, it makes the app more responsive and will save cpu cycles on the servers to keep hosting costs down.

Lately a lot of people are saying that SaaS is not a profitable business. It's partially true. Some vendors think they can build any software and sell it under the SaaS model and that it will work. Believing in this is like thinking that SaaS will turn any software into gold. However, take it the other way if your software is gold then you can potentially sell it under any model.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Welcome

As you may have have noticed, SaaS is becoming increasingly popular even though it's not really new. I've been working with SaaS for quite some time now along with Rich Internet Applications using all sorts of technology (Ajax, Gears, Flex, Air and more recently Silverlight).
Just following the trend, I am going to create yet another acronym "RIAaaS" which stands for Rich Internet Applications sold as a Service in the hope that this term will one day become popular just like SaaS, PaaS or DBaaS.
This blog is going to talk about RIA, SaaS and how they work together.