- In the 1990s, the internet was a major catalyst
for innovation in network speed and recently
healthy telecommunications competition,
forced costs downwards.
This combination of internet standard technology,
broadband networks, and low costs enabled more technology
to be delivered remotely.
This is the first time it became viable to have
complex applications delivered from a distant location.
For organizations that wanted to outsource
some of their computing applications in order
to reduce costs and focus on
their core competencies instead, they could consume
computing solutions from
an application service provider or ASP.
An ASP would build or host an existing application,
provide all the software maintenance and make it available
for a business for a monthly or annual fee.
The business user would access the application
from their networked computer.
The ASP typically hosted a full version of the application
for each buyer and so their model was typically limited
by their own infrastructure.
This constraint is one of the reasons the ASP model
wasn't sustainable in the longterm.
That said, because of its clear business benefits,
the ASP model became popular for several years.
The ASP option for organizations
hasn't completely disappeared,
but it's largely being displaced by its successor,
software as a service or SaaS.
Why did this happen?
SaaS offers the benefits of ASPs such as outsourcing
the hosting and maintenance of applications,
a subscription-based model versus capital cost,
remote access, system security, speed to deploy
and lower costs.
But SaaS has several additional benefits over ASPs.
While ASPs generally mimic an organization's
data center services by hosting application needs,
including software from many vendors,
a SaaS solution is generally a full service,
web-enabled solution that is developed exclusively
by the SaaS provider.
The customer uses the SaaS solution from any device
with an internet, browser and connection.
Any special onsite requirements
for the customer are eliminated.
That's why today you can access most SaaS software
as easily from your business laptop
connected to the corporate network
as your smartphone used from a beach on your vacation.
The ability to extend access to a multitude
of rich computing solutions for both providers
and customers from any device, at any time from anywhere
at relatively low cost is a central breakthrough
of the as a service solution space.
The SaaS model of as a service,
delivered over the internet quickly expanded to include
infrastructures as a service, IaaS,
that includes services such as storage and data backups
and platform as a service, PaaS,
which includes databases and programming environments.
Many more as a services are coming online.
Together, we now refer to these services
as everything as a service or X as a service,
and this capability is bringing completely
new value to businesses.