SaaS technology has exploded in popularity, application and advancement in the past six or so years. It’s not a new idea, let’s be honest with ourselves. The original computer inventors foresaw a future with a global telephony network of IP-based terminals and cloud computing mainframes. It only gradually became a thing, and not an encompassing thing, with the sudden popularity of the internet in the 1990s.
SaaS technology became a practical thing after the turn of the century, when after the initial .com explosion, the technology underlying it was refined and made more powerful. Coupling this with the advancements in computing power, even for portables, and you get a perfect storm of advancement facilitating advancement in a compounding cycle.
So, what are some of the advancements we’ve seen so far in 2013, and what can we expect in the six remaining months of the year? Well, it’s certainly been interesting so far.
This has been yet another year of experimental hybridizations, with learning programs becoming self-service support systems without any modification necessary. This has allowed self service to become a very practical and capable concept, and as a result, people are less afraid of the idea.
Due to this, programmability and configurability of SaaS to a higher level, thus making it legitimately as flexible as traditional models, has become a reality.
New APIs have been experimented with as well, such as advanced application of HTML5 and a newcomer as far as being a real contender, AIR. AIR is Adobe’s Flash, but on steroids, and is quickly becoming a popular platform for SaaS developers. Its API is easy to use and powerful, and is also showing that not all SaaS has to be browser-based.
This is also making scalability between PC and mobile less of a UX nightmare and less of a compatibility strain. While SaaS is cross-platform, that doesn’t apply to natively effective layouts and interaction across different displays and interfaces.
We can expect, in the next few months, to start seeing cooperative business SaaS integrate parallel realtime systems to facilitate a work from home model in greater force. There is an untapped pool of human talent that is too far away or unwilling to work in a business environment for one reason or another. These people, thanks to SaaS’ forthcoming boom in parallelism, be at long last a driving workforce, and an excellent one at that.
Cloud computing will finally incorporate gaming into the SaaS fold, with the next generation Sony and Microsoft consoles as well, which will lead to a wider demographic of people coming to understand and appreciate SaaS. This will only serve to make SaaS a stronger science, and a more widely appreciated one.
From this, we can expect Moore’s Law to begin to apply to SaaS in that it doubles in diversity and power every six months, as microprocessors do now. It’s only going to advance faster, and to greater degrees from here on out.
The digital age is just beginning, and will be the longest age of human history, likely following us all the way to the day we become extinct. SaaS technology is the future of great age, and it is good.