The network is the computer

Many years ago, when I was deployed as a soldier, my mother would write me a letter twice a week to help me keep up with what was happening back home. My replies were brief and didn’t do much to assuage the worry that most mothers feel in that situation. When I would finally come home, my mother didn’t always recognize my face – this was a time before digital photos – and it had been so long since she had seen me.

My how times change, because by contrast, I recently was able to follow my friends as they traveled around the globe for 12 months, receiving almost instantaneous updates on where they were and what they were doing that day, including photos, video and comments from several of our other friends. It’s perhaps an understatement to say we live in the world of Web 2.0, where the Web has become a tool that helps people stay in touch, collaborate or just post random thoughts that others may want to read. The network truly has become the computer.

In this new world of continuous information flow, software has become abstract, moving away from the computer in favor of Software as a Service (SaaS) based applications. SaaS applications have many advantages over traditional applications, in terms of mobility (you need never migrate your information when you move to a new computer) and very basic system resource requirements (they are designed to run on your browser, and are powered by a server that could potentially be on the other side of the globe), but most importantly, SaaS applications have a very broad market appeal due to the low overhead involved with not having to design, implement and maintain the system. It is this low overhead that lowers the entry bar for many small to medium sized businesses into realms that would otherwise be outside of their financial and technical capabilities.

Interestingly enough, for Business Service Management (BSM) vendors like Managed Objects, this opens up new opportunities to deliver SaaS-based BSM offerings that will have broad market mid-tier market appeal -- especially through its partner channel.

With so many businesses entrusting mission critical data and applications to remote service providers, SaaS based businesses, more than ever, need to examine their service management architectures in order to continually improve the service being provided to end users who are increasingly reliant on these services. Seeing as many SaaS based applications are still in their infancy, it remains to be seen whether this will indeed happen. - Jonathan Golan