Busting Myths of SaaS and PaaS: The Enterprise Meets the Cloud (June 2008)

Software as a Service (SaaS) got its start as an ideal option for a small or medium business lacking in-depth, inhouse IT resources. First-generation SaaS offerings were therefore optimized for simplicity and even today, it's still common to find SaaS products and portfolios that lack the scalability, customizability and protection of intellectual property that enterprises demand from a strategic platform. Moderate extensibility is not enough to transform these shallow foundations into credible alternatives to established enterprise platforms. No one should fall into the trap, though, of thinking that these simplest SaaS applications represent the limits of what SaaS can do or what a Platform as a Service (PaaS) can enable.