Kiss My SaaS

Thank you Salesforce.com for creating this SaaS phenomenon.  While Salesforce.com is close to being the 'Xerox' of the SaaS industry (you know when you use the name of a company to identify a market like 'Kleenex'), there are plenty of other use cases of SaaS beyond CRM.  Many mid-size companies are turning to SaaS-based solutions.  In fact, recent ESG Research unveiled that 34% of mid sized business are using SaaS solutions in production.  Many of these solutions are not CRM, but rather other applications where people would much rather interact with the software without having to manage it and the underlying technology infrastructure.  Some bullets on other SaaS offering:

• Backup as a Service is becoming more popular and gaining Salesforce.com-like notoriety.  With heavyweights like Seagate (E-vault), EMC (Mozy), Symantec, and Iron Mountain coupled with innovators like Asigra and Nirvanix, there are plenty of ways to protect your laptops and servers without licensing software.  Twenty-three percent of mid size organizations are using some form of Backup as a Service solutions and that number will only increase.
• Legal service providers often deliver search (and derivatives of search technology such as review tools) in a SaaS model.  This allows attorneys to send data to the provider, get it indexed and then log in via the web and start Googling around.  The Googling is a bit more important in these situations because there courts and regulatory bodies involved.
• By now, people reading this blog should know my hatred for e-mail mailbox quotas.  However, I can sympathize with the IT departments who cannot deploy archiving solutions because they do not have the resources to run them.  Enter Archiving as a Service where messages and attachments can be groomed out of inboxes and retained somewhere outside of your data center.  Employees can access the archived messages through a web interface - some of which resemble Outlook as not everyone welcomes change.
• Not a big fan of running Exchange or Lotus in-house?  Same with SharePoint?  Utilize Collaboration Apps as a Service (I am now stretching it!).  These applications can be a pain in the SaaS to support so why not let someone else do the heavy lifting. 
• Soon the Tech Wife and I will need DCaaS.  Diaper Changing as a Service.  If anyone has suggestions, please let me know.

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