SaaS Week

I remember a survey a few months back that showed the not too surprising finding that many companies didn't know the difference between SaaS, Web 2.0, and SOA -- and one survey that found companies were not interested in Web 2.0 but definitely wanted to jump on the collaboration bandwagon. Acronyms and buzz words are a kind of a pet peeve of mine, since I think they too often make it harder rather than easier to communicate -- and then everyone gets caught up in using the terminology rather than the actual concepts behind the words.

So I was interested to see an article in the San Jose Mercury News that proclaimed SaaS to be "web 2.0 for the business class." Umm, say what? Most of the article was decent enough for explaining SaaS to general readers, but SaaS and Web 2.0 are not synonyms. Wikipedia, for example, has the definition I've understood to be the meaning of Web 2.0: "the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users." In other words, Web 2.0 is blogs, social networks, wikis, and collaboration technology.

SaaS, in contrast, is a delivery mode. It's not a trend, really, but "a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet." Web 2.0 tools can involve SaaS, but SaaS does not by default necessarily have anything to do with Web 2.0.

So I just sort of thought that calling SaaS a "web 2.0 for the business class" was a little bit strange. But then again, who's surprised? Apparently a recent survey found that 44% of businesses considered "enterprise 2.0" tools to be important but 75% of those businesses also had vague familiarity or no familiarity at all with what enterprise 2.0 actually was. So it seems no one knows what they're talking about anyway. It makes you definitely wonder if we might be better off without buzz words.