Posted on January 12, 2014 by daleV
I've talked about the cloud and cloud computing in my last
two articles and about the war going on between Internet service providers to
gain market share and provide services to companies and individuals. The
war is a silent war, but one that is intense, and is the next big technology
marketing challenge.
The challenge is how to separate
what one service provider offers from another provider's services. It's
like how do you decide which chiropractor to go to to get your back aligned.
The initial marketing efforts have
segmented the market using acronyms, that in most cases, are clear as
mud. What has evolved is a concensus marketing acronym, that is, an
initial letter with "aaS" tacked on, for "as a service."
As a service, aaS, implies cloud
computing. The companies with these types of services offer Internet
based services.
What are these aaS services?
It's almost like alphabet soup. It seems like any service that can be
provided over the Internet has an acronym. Let's go through these
acroynms.
SaaS - Software as a
Service: Companies with these
products provide on demand software over the Internet. All a user has to
do is log into the service in their browser.
A couple of examples of companies
that offer this type of serivce are: Salesforce.com that connect a
companies sales force together with a CRM application to boost sales, and
Netsuite which offers core integrated business systems over the Internet.
This market is huge and growing,
estimated at over $10 B dollars a year. Essentially, companies that sell
a software program on a CD, now want to offer an Internet based version for a
monthly fee.
PaaS - Platform as a
Service: These services provide both the
hardware, operating system, and software stack to run any application you want
to run on the Internet.
IaaS - Infrastructure as
a Service: These companies provide the entire
IT infrastructure on the Internet. Hardware, disk space, memory,
operating system, and companion software, like load balancing. Just to
confuse you, this is sometimes called HaaS, or hardware as a service.
Amazon AWS is an example.
The above three are the main
services offered by Internet providers, but there are several spin-off services
that have sprung up.
CaaS - Communication as a
Service: These companies provide
Voice over IP, VPN connections, PBX switching, Web meetings, and manage
company communications so a company doesn't have to invest in this
infrastructure.
XaaS - Anything as a
Service: Now here's a good one, this is a
catchall for companies that offer many of these services and don't want to be
put into any one of the segments.
To give you an example at how messed
up the marketing of these acronyms are, there are two, MaaS and DaaS, that mean
two different services.
MaaS - Metal as a Service: This is an underlying service that provides flexible
hardware configuration to run any software application.
MaaS - Monitoring as a
Service: This service offers to monitor
your network, software applications and internet usage for a fee, of course.
DaaS - Data as a Service: These companies offer data on demand any where in
world. The advantage to a company is their data is secure, constantly
backed up, recoverable, and synchronized, running on several servers in
different locations in the world.
DaaS - Desktop as a
Service: The idea is to have your
home computer desktop running on a computer on the Internet. Amazon's AWS
tries to do this now, but they don't address the mass market, where the money
is going to be. The market is for an individual to sign up for the
service and immediately have a Windows 8.1 computer running on the
Internet. No one is quite there yet.
I think this market is huge.
One of the problems is Microsoft is one of the competitors in the market place
and they don't want to change their licensing to accommodate services providers
that may compete with them. Microsoft, of course, wants the market to
themselves, but they're just not there yet. Google and Amazon's AWS
are way ahead in market share.
