In the past few years, SaaS technology has come a very long way. At one point, it was just a theoretical idea with no technology to support it. As web technologies became more refined and more dynamic, application-like interface and logic was possible over browsers. Where once only clunky Java applets and Flash SWF files could work in this way, now any web feed could carry executed code and responsive interface.
So, SaaS has gone from a few simple web services to a platform that has made a countless number of niche markets suddenly practical and profitable. This not only meant more space for developers to make ideas a reality, but it meant that new, very specifically-tasked software of high caliber could be made available.
But, in the next year, what further progress or additional advancement can we expect out of SaaS technology? Well, we can only speculate about the future, of course. Even though the next year isn’t that far removed, and so it’s easier to estimate trends, it’s still impossible to predict things.
But, since the past couple years brought on HTML5, and then the blast expansion of new software niches, I suspect, as do many of my colleagues, that the next few years are going to be a different kind of trend.
While more new niches, and innovations in existing ones will continue for a long time to come, we’re going to see a shift of mediums and centrisms that SaaS will be a major facilitator of.
Now, in recent times, we’ve seen an increase in power given to online multimedia, with internet radio and video streaming increasing in video quality and integrity. New deals for availability are making vast libraries of studio content accessible on demand for little cost. Internet radio has been free for a long time, and online MP3 services for pennies are also quite prolific now.
Still, at the moment, older forms of delivery continue to endure. We’re going to see a huge explosion in SaaS-powered multimedia production, delivery and access systems in the following year, and beyond.
With the growth of gamification in training and workplace activities, more dynamism for actual gaming technology over simple but powerful cloud facilities is going to come around very soon as well.
This decade is the beginning of the transition of everything to digital, and for the digital to be ubiquitous.
Now, this won’t happen over night, so we should expect the next year to only call a lot of new attention in tech progress blogs, but no new wow products.
However, the advances we are sure to expect from existing technologies will certainly be worth the wait, and whatever the big thing Google’s been rumbling about planning is sure to be an experience.
Still, the upcoming year is going to be a time of growth of application support, more than a boom of new buzz words and viral technologies. SaaS technology is going to see repeated phases like this for a long time to come, as computing technology continues to grow, and the bandwidth to support high yield internet cultivates further and further. The next year may not sound exciting, but the things it’ll bring about shortly thereafter will worth it.
