I made the following statement within one of my replies to the Slashdot masses:
“After all, I think the move towards “Software as a Service” is a trend for all applications (might take some time, but it will happen).”
Well, at the time you may have thought I was throwing around the latest industry buzzwords. However, I’m actually a battle wounded veteran of the ASP dot-com days. For those of you not familiar with that acronym, it means Application Service Provider. At the time, most of the startups that jumped into the ASP space failed. But, while the death march of companies (mine included) that tanked was brutal to watch. The conceptual notion a virtualization, server based computing, applications on demand, etc. was well ahead of its time.
Fast forward to 2008… the ASP acronym has morphed to SaaS and the technologies around this space are very real and very alive. For example, there are the well known faces of SaaS which include Google Apps, Salesforce, Live, etc. On the other hand, there are also a number of SaaS undercurrents that seem to surface from time to time. One such undercurrent seemed to bubble up last week with Microsoft’s Virtualization Adoption announcement (Link). A brief summary is a follows:
· Microsoft purchased Calista Technologies (better graphics for virtualized environments)
· Hypervisor and management interoperability with Citrix (the strange relationship continues, perhaps to beat VMware).
· Citrix’s XenDesktop and Presentation Server products and managed by System Center (wow).
· Windows Vista Home Basic and Windows Vista Home Premium are now licensed for use in a virtual machine environment (about time!).
· Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop is now an estimated retail price of $23 per desktop (well… that is one way to sell Vista).
· Microsoft Office system support for Microsoft Application Virtualization (about time!).
Overall, these announcements give a clear indication about where MS is going with this virtualization thing. If you want more information, check out the revamped MS Virtualization site: Link. It’s pretty!
Anyhow, the point of my post was too hopefully give everyone some insight into the train that has been gaining momentum for some time. At this point, we are starting to leave the station for a ride what will most likely change the face of enterprise and consumer computing forever. If you are not on the train… you may have a hard time catching it. So… my opinion would be to start doing some homework.
