SaaS has been around for long though in different forms.
SABRE airline reservation system that I used in my first international flight (Madras London Chicago) as early as early 70’s
SWIFT inter-bank electronic payment systems
actually delivered software solution as a dedicated service to select “agents”.
HotMail (the first web-based mail) and several web-based mail service including GMail, Yahoo Mail, Rediff or FastMail were the next instances of software delivered as service
SalesForce.com was the “iconic” SaaS offering in the past 10 years
iTunes & iPhone too made SaaS “notion” familiar to the end users
not all such “software delivery” was “architected” as SaaS applications.
SoA (Service oriented architecture) has been maturing over the years and many successful applications are getting re-architected for SaaS.
There is a “philosophy” of SaaS, there is a “business model of SaaS” (pay as you use) and the “technology” of SaaS; what this conference does is to take a balanced view of all the three aspects.
Iconic Indian companies
TCS, Ramco, Persistent, ABS, Mastek, Mindtree, Sarena and IBS
as well as MNC’s
SAP, Microsoft and Jamcracker including SalesForce.com
are presenting their work in this conference; some of them have stalls too. They represent software vendors, ISV’s (Independent Software Vendors), System Integrators (SI) and technology vendors. Of course the focus goes beyond technology to security issues as well.
With Dr FC Kohli, Former Chairman of India’s largest & oldest software services company TCS and the Mr PRV Raja, Founder & CEO of Ramco Systems – India’s best known software product company that is now re-engineering their product into SaaS offering – giving Keynote addresses, the Conference brings some of the best minds together. We should than IET team that has come all the way from London to organize this Conference in Bangalore.
(Introductory remarks as the Event General Chair for the IET International Conference on SaaS held at Grand Ashok Hotel, Bangalore during Oct 14-15, 2008)
Tags: Bangalore, FC Kohli, IET Conference, PRV Raja, Ramco, SaaS, TCS
