Recently, I had an opportunity to see a few slides made by Gartner.  Gartner says as their Strategic Planning Hypothesis that, by 2012, about 80% of Fortune 1,000 companies would use Cloud Computing Service in some fashion, and 30% of them would use Application Infrastructure Service known as PaaS (Platform as a Service) and/or System Infrastructure Service known as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

Some examples of the PaaS are force.com (from salesforce.com), Microsoft XRM, and Google application engine, and those of the IaaS may be Amazon web services, and WindowsAzure fabric controller as far as I heard of.

This means that Gamutsoft can provide a small scale SaaS such as e-Service Desk for our customers; however, PaaS and IaaS may be the world of global scale big IT players. Although we may not be able to provide PaaS and/or IaaS directly to our customers, I hope Gamutsoft could be a good consultant for our customers how to utilize such functions.

Putting what we can do aside, I all the time be frustrated whenever a new IT jargon is released, so I would like to tell you why.

You may agree that a customer specific application (software) development is a service. Therefore, we do not need to say “Software as a Service” in this case. No?

On the other hand, off-the-shelf packages are sold at any store (or by a vendor) as a product.

Is the terminology “SaaS” limited to apply to those ready-made (not tailor made) packages as a service?  If the word “SaaS” is clearly defined in such a way, I may fully agree.

At the SSC and BPO Congress held in October 22nd in Shanghai, I said that Gamutsoft provides SaaP, i.e. Service as a Product (a half joke).  Why I said so is because I feel most of IT service can be sold as a packaged solution, but not everything, of course.

Today, what I would like to say is:

“Don’t be dazzled by IT jargons. They often work as a jammer to straighten our mindset.  We must know the substance is far more essential than the jargons that appear to be, and we need to re-define the scope of those words in our mind before using them.”