Posts tagged ‘SaaS’
The New New Thing
Before we dive back into geekier topics, I highly recommend that you click on this image and buy Lewis’ book. It is a great distillation of the valley’s culture during the Internet bubble.
In my last post, I talked about how Salesforce.com had bought back the venerable timesharing model by applying the new architectural model of multi-tenancy. Multi-tenancy made timesharing viable for the Internet era. (more…)
Back to the future
In my last post, I talked about how the time sharing model for enterprise apps was displaced by user owned data centers and on premise deployments of enterprise software. In the late nineties, a plethora of companies tried to reinvigorate the timeshare model, using the Internet as a cheaper network backbone.
These companies, collectively called Application Service Providers (ASP), used a variety of different approaches to deliver enterprise software over the web. They ranged from: (more…)
Everything Old Is New Again
I had a discussion recently with a very talented but young product manager on the merits of SaaS (Software as a Service) and multi-tenancy versus traditional Enterprise Software. The discussion got a little easier when I gave him some history about how we got here. Yeah, I realize that knowing this history makes me ancient in programmer years.
SaaS could be defined as the combination of a new architectural model known as multi-tenancy with a payment model which has been around since the mainframe era — timesharing. In this post I will focus on the history of timesharing. In the next post I will discuss multi-tenancy.
SaaS re-introduced the hardware/software rental model known as timesharing to the world. For those of you who are young enough to think that Paul McCartney was always a solo act it may seem shocking, but yes people where renting software and data centers decades before Salesforce.com was founded.
(more…)
