COPYCENSE

“For years, organizations of all sizes have suffered the hassles and unexpected costs that accompany deploying and maintaining a variety of traditional software applications that, ironically, were intended to make them more productive. Now a new breed of Web-based services are pushing legacy applications aside and finally giving users the business benefits they’ve been seeking.

“This new form of software-as-a-service, or SaaS, has been spearheaded by Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management and salesforce automation applications, and NetSuite’s “net-native” enterprise resource planning applications.

“These companies have recognized the inherent inefficiencies of the traditional software market, including the tremendous time, effort, and cost that organizations — especially large-scale midsize businesses — have to expend to install applications and keep them up and running.

“Despite the success of these companies, many people are still skeptical about the long-term success of SaaS. Others are concerned that recent Salesforce.com outages represent a fundamental fault line in the SaaS landscape.”

Jeffrey Kaplan. Software-as-a-Service Myths. BusinessWeek Online. April 17, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.