Cloud Computing Blog

Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS)

I was asked the other day is Cloud Computing like SaaS? Well I thought I would share the response for anyone else that night be interested in my opinion.

SaaS is about delivering a single application, normally this application has been written to be very scalable and a single application instance can serve many many customers. Almost exclusively these applications are Web 2.0 applications delivered to the end user in a browser from the Internet or Cloud.

A good example of this is SalesForce.com a well know CRM application.

The similarities between SaaS and Cloud Computing are the fact that the client is buying a service which normally consists of the applications an amount of storage space and a Service Level Agreement provided by a service provider. With both the solutions you normally get an elastic infrastructure 10 people 1 month 100 the next without the typical infrastructure considerations

Cloud Computing is however more about providing a completely integrated IT solution a mix of Web 2.0, and traditional applications including Office and hosted voice all within a hosted desktop.

So I would say the differences are:

Cloud Computing is capable of delivering an integrated IT solution comprising of all your applications rather than a single application.

Cloud Computing is about running your IT as a service with predictable costs and a quantifiable Service Level Agreement.

I feel compelled to write something about the telephone experience I have had with 4 companies in the last 3 weeks that I almost abandoned the call.  In fact twice I had the phone put down on me because they could not hear me.  The most amazing thing was that 2 of them were IT companies.

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