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This article mainly introduces "what is the essence of SaaS". In daily operation, I believe many people have doubts about the nature of SaaS. The editor consulted all kinds of materials and sorted out simple and easy-to-use methods of operation. I hope it will be helpful for you to answer the doubts about "what is the essence of SaaS?" Next, please follow the editor to study!

Pre-SaaS era

The prototype of cloud services can be traced back to the 1960s.

Yes, that's right, it's the 1960s.

Friends who are familiar with computer chronicles may know the timeshare operating system / TimeSharing System.

It consists of a host and a plurality of terminals with a display and keyboard connected to it. The time-sharing system divides the time of CPU into several time slices. The operating system takes time slices as units and takes turns to serve each end user.

In the 1960s, personal computers were not yet available, and mainframes were too expensive. A very small number of teams that have access to computers share resources in the same host, calculate and work in a time-sharing manner.

This sounds like what we call "timeshare" today, and the logic behind it is similar to that of today's more and more enterprises choosing to "go to the cloud". In any era, cooperation, sharing, and reasonable co-ordination of resources are the only way for enterprises to survive and develop.

Today, the scope of cloud services has gone far beyond storage, computing and other IaaS layers, enriching a large number of PaaS platforms and SaaS applications, providing enterprises with more choices. The originator of SaaS application can be traced back to 1980s~1990s.

That was the time when Oracle and SAP competed for hegemony. Oracle, a magical company, came out of two people who later changed the landscape of B2B software services:

The designer of the world's first CRM software "Siebel Systems": Thomas Siebel.

The founder of Salesforce: Marc Benioff.

Let's call them Tom & Marc.

After many years in charge of sales at Oracle, Tom launched his own Siebel Systems in 1993 to focus on developing and selling the leading CRM software at that time. Its concept and design ideas for CRM products greatly inspired many manufacturers, including Salesforce.

After Tom left, Marc took his place and continued to be in charge of Oracle's software business, which also included CRM products. The following year, in 1994, web browsers were introduced to the market by Netscape, and in the same year, Bezos began selling books online, and the future e-commerce giant Amazon first appeared.

In 1995, the financial reimbursement software Concur, which was later acquired by SAP, launched online licence for the first time, becoming the first commercial software company to eat "e-commerce" crabs.

Watching commercial software break through the clouds in just a few years, Marc, then vice president of Oracle, asked a question: can I get customers to buy and use our CRM directly in the browser like online shopping?

Is there any way to abandon the lengthy and troublesome implementation process and reduce the high cost of software, so that every commercial company can easily and quickly use the already systematic business software?

The answer he handed over was Salesforce, which was born in 1999.

No Software!

Marc gave Salesforce the first slogan.

Since then, the era of SaaS has finally come.

Difficult problems and some detours

However, the development of SaaS is not plain sailing because of the birth of a new concept.

In fact, in the early days of Salesforce, selling SaaS was much harder than it is today. Among the many problems, the first to bear the brunt is the user experience.

Around the year 2000, dial-up Internet access is still widely used, and the CDN acceleration service has just been released. At that time, it took several seconds to transmit a picture of 50kb. This makes the interface design of SaaS products more simple and even primitive than traditional software. Even so, locally deployed software is relatively faster because it is accessed through an internal network.

The second is the security of data. In particular, large enterprises with the ability to purchase traditional software at that time always felt sorry for the fact that "the data is not in their own data center". Fortunately, small and micro enterprises have less concern about this, which gives SaaS the soil to develop.

Interestingly, with the growth of Salesforce and its launch in 2004, there is an ironic form of software on the market: SoSaaS.

We all know that SaaS is Software as a Service, so what is SoSaaS? This So is not the ultimate meaning, it is: Same old Software as a Service.

Speak human words: hang a sheep's head and sell dog meat. Under the guise of SaaS "web App + low Annual fee", the "multi-tenant" architecture has not been realized.

. For Salesforce, even though they have a huge number of customers today, all their online customers are using exactly the same version of the same system.

Those SoSaaS who were eliminated by history followed the traditional software model at that time: its underlying architecture was still independent development of software for each customer, independent management and maintenance, but could not charge enough service fees. As a result, gradually, this mode of living beyond the means can no longer support the operation of the company.

Fortunately, this detour is not long. A set of standard SaaS model that serves multi-tenancy still keeps its pure pedigree developed.

What is the nature of SaaS?

Over the past few years, the SaaS industry has been surging, and there has been a lot of discussion, but few people talk about SaaS products, or the nature of cloud services.

In my opinion, the essence of SaaS is the democratization of commercial software.

The word Democratization has been widely used in the fields of economics and pedagogy.

The industrial revolution brought about the democratization of consumption: exquisite objects and expensive electrical appliances enjoyed by princes and aristocrats in the past have become daily consumer goods available to everyone with the process of industrialization.

This is especially true of education. With the popularization and promotion of compulsory education, knowledge, a scarce resource monopolized by the elite in the past, has become the source of empowerment for the general benefit of the people.

Going back to the development of commercial software, the emergence of SaaS shows the same trend. From purchasing a behemoth in its entirety to renting a relatively standardized system on demand, SaaS makes business software cheap, lightweight, accessible and available to everyone.

In a nutshell, today's SaaS products show six significant advantages for enterprise customers over traditional software:

Lower procurement cost and easier decision-making

Right out of the box

Upgrade-free, patch-free

Flexible expansion, no worries

Data is more secure

The service is more intimate

With the rise of SaaS, every enterprise, regardless of size and revenue, can open a browser and use professional software services created by many industry experts at a very low price or even free of charge.

This is not only the democratization of commercial software, but also the future that will benefit all enterprise customers.

At this point, the study of "what is the essence of SaaS" is over. I hope to be able to solve your doubts. The collocation of theory and practice can better help you learn, go and try it! If you want to continue to learn more related knowledge, please continue to follow the website, the editor will continue to work hard to bring you more practical articles!

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