Virtual Entrepreneur

Software-As-A-Service Concept Is Growing

October 15th, 2008 | Author: Master Money

Entrepreneur.com:
A handful of tech firms are stepping up to help business owners make lemonade out of the financial lemons harvested on Wall Street this fall. Updated software and web design services are shifting into high gear, marketing themselves to small businesses as money savers for belt-tightening entrepreneurs.

In recent months, Tarzana, Calif.-based InfoStreet began boosting its campaign to target its StreetSmart virtual office system and optional “customer relationship management” application to small businesses. The company is taking the software-as-a-service concept to new heights by offering e-mail, a calendar, a workflow manager, file storage and sharing, web publishing, optional customer management and more, all accessible online via any web browser.

Theoretically, proprietors could throw out the IT guy and a rat’s nest of network cables and simply plug each company laptop into the internet and go to work. InfoStreet’s CEO Siamak Farah compares the SaaS evolution to the industrial revolution and the advent of tap water.

“We’re going through a major paradigm shift,” Farah says. “Nowadays, you open the tap and the water comes to you. A similar thing is happening in technology and IT. Whether they’re small or large, businesses had their own servers and someone to maintain them. And if they grew, they had to add servers. Now with software as a service, you plug into the internet and this software just comes down the pipe.”

The service is part of the “cloud computing” revolution. Experts believe that, in the near future, computers will be used mainly to access the internet. Files, programs and communication will be stored and facilitated in the cloud of data that makes up the web. Computers won’t run programs; they’ll only be needed to access them.

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