A story of the evolution of SaaS
At one point, servers and services were hosted very close.
A company that wanted email, for instance, had a dedicated
special computer in a cabin, connected to both a power cable
and the fixed Internet; and that computer ran an email service
program. The admin was asked to add and remove users, as per need.
The admin alone could touch the intricate settings of the
email system. The server was definitely “hands off!” area
for the rest of the staff, and sometimes these network
admins had not so good reputation. Some were super friendly
and wanted to be of maximum help to people within the company,
others seemed a bit esoteric and always boiling some magic brew — of which the finance guys or CEO was not at all sure made sense, balance sheet -wise.
Occasionally the network admin received large packages, even delivered by pickups, which contained more of the high-tech gear that was said
to be absolutely necessary to fend off malicious actors of cyber armies all around the world.
All this! For every mom’n pop -shop that had 5 employees and needed some digital leverage, a presence in the new bold digital ether… There was a need for someone wearing quite many hats in the realms of digital wizardry.
Btw. What we nowadays take for granted, for example email — these utility software were huge and quite complex to administer. For example the legendary ‘sendmail’ mail transport agent in Unix and Linux platforms is known to be a beast. A sendmail sits running on the server, takes in email messages, and relays them to proper places. If you wanted your employees to have email addresses, and take control of the details, there were few options but to bite the bullet and learn to administer one of these pieces of software.
The network admin was either too well versed, or a beginner.
Both were kind of dangerous things. Well educated wizards basically were either spending too much to keep their minds intrigued with challenges, but perhaps even more dangerous were the amateurs that actually kept business on a verge of collapse — if only anyone else understood what was going on.
From business point of view it made absolutely no sense, ONCE cloud computing and email services were as easy to get as buying a pint of milk.
So cloud makes sense in a lot of cases.
Cloud computing is part about enabling specialization of labor, and its fruits be sold as a service. (Yes, that is the “SaaS” we are talking about)
You can virtually get yourself a chunk of a whole team of experts
when buying SaaS. You’re actually buying a COPY of several hundreds of
man-years of innovation, but it’s securitized into a monthly
recurring payment, so no one pays upfront for a huge lump sum
of innovation costs. Perfect!
So now the mom’n pop shop took (not only) the servers out of a cabin,
but:
- they got rid of the cabin space (lower rents)
- no need to think about power supply or backups
- no need to hire a network admin for work
- scalability of SaaS services, as turn-key operation — if needed
- still, do keep the fire extinguisher on the wall :-)
Small businesses have in fact lowered both the need of initial capital, as well as operational costs — all while probably also increasing business continuity and kept increasing product quality.
