A FIELD GUIDE TO Hosted Apps

摘要

Everywhere you turn, another company pops up offering SaaS (software as a service). Inspired by the success of Salesforce.com, SaaS vendors are hoping customers large and small will get the message: Browser-based, pay-as-you-go applications mean fewer servers for your IT department to maintain and less capital to shake loose from the CFO for software licenses and hardware. For whatever such estimates are worth, IDC recently forecasted that worldwide spending on SaaS will reach $10.7 billion by 2009. But there's so much SaaS running around already that we couldn't help but wonder: Could you run a business entirely on hosted offerings?