I know, I know. It's been two months since I've blogged. I guess I haven't felt in a sassy mood. It's not easy to write like that in between vacation, catching up after vacation, and writing formal business plans and white papers. As a colleague said to me today, "white paper is death to blogger girl". It's hard enough to be amusing and informative on these IT topics as it is. Some of you are thinking "We're still waiting."
There's an awful lot of talk around here about software as a service (SaaS). I wasn't all that familiar with it until a few years ago. When someone first said SaaS, I thought they were talking about that complicated statistical program. They enlightened me about software as a service. A service? Does it program the car to pick up the kids after practice? Can it clean these piles of paper off my desk? I'm sure there's a July blog in there somewhere.
SaaS, is also known as "pay by the drink", which tells me this was probably coined on New Year's Eve or at Yankee Stadium. Put simply, it means you pay for what you use. It's like buying utilities but in this case, it is more interactive (unless of course you have mood lighting in your office in which case you probably are charging by the drink.)
This all fits in nicely with the whole concept of managed services. The focus on managed services has been often on the infrastructure side for many years. Application hosting providers did develop offerings where they provided secure data centers to host your software and save you money. One view of how the whole concept of software as a service evolved is in this blog. I don't know if he's right but I like the title of his blog.
But why not tie it all together? Is it possible to offer remote or collocated infrastructure managed services along with basic infrastructure application hosting, all managed by one company?
Not scared yet, how about adding vertical specific applications for a simple, no pressure industry like pharmaceuticals or biotechs? You know, these industries that need a qualified infrastructure and validated application before the big bad wolf comes knocking. Qualified? Validated? Does that mean the valet is trained by a government official to put the little sticker on your parking slip?
But we think it can be done and to raise the ante a bit, we think it can be done in a way to accommodate companies at different stages of their drug development lifecycle. It requires strong software partners with good products combined with the expertise of hundreds of collective years of life science experience.
My question to you all (ya'll), is it needed? Will companies be willing to pay for it? Can a qualified infrastructure and validated applications be bought by the drink like a bottle of sasparilla? Can we even buy sasparilla anymore? Or is it just root beer with a fancy name that they try to tell me is also spelled sarsaparilla. (That just sounds like sasparilla with a bad accent.)
What say you? I'm interested in hearing opinions on this topic. You can comment here or email at blog@csdg.com.
The Marketing Maven
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