Information as a Service

As I do every day I was reading some blogs in my RSS reader.  Morgan over at Architected Information wrote a great post yesterday called "Who will be the next VisiCalc".  So after I stepped out of my reverie of thinking back to Engineering school and using that tool on an old x86 PC I read his post.

Morgan talked about some new tools (which you can read about on his post) and the power of disruptive innovation.  As you may know that is a favorite topic for us here at Project X.  But the killer piece that he brings up is the idea of free software.

"Nothing in Life is Free" // OR // "You Get What You Paid For"
– someone once said

When implementing an Enterprise Application or solution the software and hardware are only a piece of the puzzle.  You have to get it in and running the way you like it.  Many software vendors when positioning their products with Systems Integrators talk about thing like for every $1 of software the client will need $3-$10 of services.  Whether this is over the life of the solution or just the implementation, suddenly the impact of the cost of the software is subtly different.

But take it further, in an Information as a Service (IaaS) offering or other Software as a Service (SaaS) offering you not only get the application, you get some best in class things (Services, models, processes …).  This is an interesting paradigm and should force some interesting innovation from the existing players.  Microsoft with Microsoft Live as well as many others.

Thanks Morgan for getting me thinking on this again.  I had just been in a client dinner last night hashing this stuff around.

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