Buzz words/phrases are fun. Usually they have some sort of abbreviation that you can use to make yourself sound knowledgeable in front of others. In fact, some terms have so many acronyms that some individuals will choose the most obscure one possible to present an aura of superiority amongst their peers.
Now don’t get me wrong, saying “software as a service” ten times fast isn’t exactly the simplest of verbal feats, but my question is - why am I saying this in the first place? Software has been offered as a service for quite some time now, yet this particular buzz phrase hasn’t been around nearly as long. Just a few short years ago we used the nice, simple descriptive phrase “application hosting”. Those of us that provided the service were simply “application service providers” (ASPs).
Web 2.0 is another one of those fancy terms. Be honest with yourself, w/o doing a quick Google search, mentally list off all the features of Web 2.0, and give a brief description of exactly what Web 2.0 is. This audience tends to be fairly up to date on such buzzy words, so I’d guess many of you did just fine. But do your customers really have a clue? Paul Hirsch, co-owner of Equentity Web design firm, has a rather humorous article in the May issue of the WHIR. He writes that, when responding to customers who will sit down with him and ask for a Web 2.0 site, many times he’ll offer instead to create a Web 5.3 site. What exactly is Web 5.3? Well he doesn’t exactly know, “but it sounds even more advanced than Web 2.0 with that larger number.” Like SaaS, many of the technologies that comprise the Web 2.0 platform have also been around for years.
When FastServers recently announced that we were introducing fully managed dedicated Exchange hosting I was congratulated on jumping into SaaS. Coming from a rather knowledgeable source, I was a bit taken aback that he would have been so quick to be caught-up in this lingo, all the while failing to realize that we’ve been “involved” in SaaS for years now. I guess we just didn’t label it distinctly for him. Another industry insider recently asked me if we were soon going to be getting into VoIP or other SaaS services. I explained that for the past three years we’ve actively supported numerous customers who offer various business platforms, such as Salesforce, and others that have been utilizing our dedicated product for their own VoIP offerings. This gentleman replied with, “Okay, so FastServers stays on the cutting edge of technology by having customers that are on the cutting edge of technology.” Obviously the humor of that reply was insinuated, but it made me step back and really think – in this era of “buzz words” a provider could legitimately be offering all the latest and yet not be applying the current trendy tag to it.
In reality, FastServers could have many more sub-sections: VoIP servers, Salesforce Servers, OpSource servers, Web 2.0 servers. We could even charge extra and guarantee our customer base that these servers have been specially optimized for each of the above-mentioned services. If we traced back to find the earliest deployments of these onto our network we could even decorate our web site with the line “Pioneers in SaaS & Web 2.0!”
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