Industry news

Cloud computing... the future for software or pie in the sky?

At their conference in November, Microsoft was the latest high profile technology company to announce its commitment to cloud computing and hosted services with Windows Azure.

Hosted applications and platforms are not new to the world of IT. There are a huge range of software companies offering their products via Software as a Service (SaaS) model. These range from industry heavyweights like Oracle through to agile start-ups that produce paid-for Facebook applications.

However, the significance and scale of Microsoft's commitment to Software as a Service should not be underestimated. At the conference Dave Thompson, corporate vice president of Microsoft online, went on to say: "In the future, all our enterprise software will be delivered as an online service".

When the world's best known software company openly embraces hosted applications, is it a sign that software is dead? Salesforce.com, certainly thinks so. It is reflected in its company slogan 'Success. No Software'.

It seems that software is alive and well, however, the landscape is changing. Organisations want choice; for some the SaaS will be their future route, whilst others will use software in its traditional sense for the time being.

To cater for both types of customer, we launched our on demand platform in May last year. Already we have seen significant uptake amongst our customer base, with some of the main reasons they have chosen this approach being to:

• minimise risk - prevent the need to maintain multiple versions of software across different applications
• reduce cost
• improve agility

Smaller companies we work with will benefit from having data hosted and managed so that they can free up valuable internal IT resources. For larger companies, on demand technology means that functionality can be quickly built into multiple applications and support Service Orientated Architecture strategies, which allow communication across different platforms and different programming language boundaries.

Many companies have their own reason for preferring on-site over on-demand; reasons which range from security to compliance, or from budgeting to bandwidth. Whilst we have seen a sizable growth in adoption of SaaS there will always be a huge market for on-site software.

Is your company moving towards hosted services, and if so why? Do your own drivers match our observations? What key Experian QAS products, services or data assets are you most keen to consume on-demand?

Find out more about QAS On Demand

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