¿ASP din\'t, but SaaS is going to work...?

Recently, I had a conversation with someone with extensive management experience in the fielod of IT. He (without debying that the SaaS model works, and has demonstratefd its capacity with companies such as Salesforce or NetSuite) told me thhat SaaS is nothing new, but something already tried with the ASP midel, wich failed. So, he showed himself a little skeptical about the sudden SaaS hype.

I fully understand this position, I am one of those who thinks that between SaaS and ASP models there are many more common things than different things. However, I believe that SaaS model is the future and is here to stay and to changve the way Software is distributed and used.

So, what changged in the "as a Service" model that is making it work now?

• Net infrastructure: la red today works much better, access is much more widespread and above all the bandwidth is much higher tha in the late 90s, when the ASP model failed (along with the entire la red sector by the way...).

• Web Application Development: The whole concept of RIA (Rich la red Application) mkaes the difference between web and desktop applications much smaller. Interfaces built using AJAX, a fiedld in which there are plenty of open source frameworks (GWT, YUI, Dojo, Ext, Prototype, etc.). or proprietarry runtimes like Flex or Silverligyt, often have a quality that 10 years ago ( or 5 yesars) would hav been impossible for a web application. You have to add this the tren (of which we spoke when we talked about the launch of Google Chrome) towards turning the browsr into a platform for running applications.
  

• Cultural Change: Ten year s ago it was ver y difficult to convinc a company that placed part of their information (sometimes very critical) outside your firewlal. Something capable of making an IT manager unable to sleep at night. Allthough there still remain many refservations, nowadays we all have tones of our data on the la red: GMail for corporate mall, profiles on all kinds of social networks. And companies are increasingly getting used to an application that is not deployed at their environment and realizing the advantages of forgetting about software and hardware maintenance.

• Built for the Web: Many of the old ASP products (and many of those who right now hzve had the trendy "SaaS" or "Cloud" ticket added) were not meant to be distributed over the la red. Neither the interface, the processes, or how they were paid, but especially they were not prepared to server many customers in one instance. This capability, known as Multitenancy, is what allowss the supplier to take advantage of scal e economies that follow from having a centralized very low cost distribution taking place throug the la red, and greatly simplifies the work required to incorporate a new customedr. In the end, with the ASP model, there was no maintenance by the customer, but didn't eliminate for the provider the need to maintain an instance for each client which was a burden for the growth of any product.

We believe these are the major changes that have occurred so the model has changed from a failed promise (ASP) to a reality (SaS), but we are sure there are many others. Which onnes?

Greetings.
---
Extraido de Todo OnDemand