Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
I was torn on whether or not to post this rant, but then I read a post that made my head spin….
First, there was the “Great Gmail Outage of February 2009“. There are constant Twitter outages as it grows in popularity and the servers struggle to keep up. Just last week, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail users were suffering through outages. I read on one site “Although the timing of the incident means that UK customers are unlikely to have been affected, the news will add to those doubts some users have over the software-as-a-service model.” This is the post that nudged me into posting this rant. I have had a few Hotmail accounts since 1998 and have had occasional access issues through the years, before I even knew what SaaS meant. My question is this: So What?!?
How can you doubt Saas because your free email is down? Free is free. You get what you pay for. I read that Google has offered credits to the paying GMail customers, and that is the proper thing to do. But how can executives whine because their GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo is off line when they don’t pay for it? Why are they not paying for a business email service? I have worked for a few companies that have used “ousourced” paid email services – the REAL model for SaaS. I have had scheduled outages during hours when I am sleeping.
The fact is that Saas is here to stay and it is increasing in value and popularity. Yes, Google is leading the way with their free apps. Saas is a piece of Cloud Computing. Check out this video explaining Cloud Computing in Plain English: