Cloud Computing Info

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS is currently the most popular type of cloud computing. Yahoo email, Google apps, zoho, and various other packages like CRM are all instances of SaaS. Application Service Providers (ASP) were the first SaaS providers. ASP was its own buzzword back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

One of the aspects of SaaS is multi-tenancy or the ability for many customers to share the same service but maintain their own data securely. CRM is the predominant paid SaaS offering but email is, by far, the predominant free SaaS offering.

Any software that is offered over the internet, that runs remotely (where the location is unimportant and unrelated to the user), is a SaaS offering.