Software as a service

I recently stayed at a hotel in which I saw the following label on the minibar in my room: "This minibar has a tamper-evident seal for your protection." Because I was paid to beat things like tamper-evident seals in a previous job, and was actually fairly good at it, I couldn't resist the challenge that this posed. I only had a Swiss Army knife with me, which is a little too big for this kind of work, but it turned out to be good enough. In a minute or two I had the minibar seal removed yet intact.

After looking in the minibar, I had to wonder exactly how the seal was designed to protect me. Should I have felt safer because the seal guaranteed that the minibar wasn't being used by terrorists to store a few spare pounds of weapons-grade plutonium? Instead of protecting me, the seal was really there to protect the hotel's revenue, wasn't it? Why did they feel the need to lie to me about the reason that the seal was there?

It seems like a good rule of thumb to never believe what businesses tell you about why they're doing things. This applies to more than just hotels. It also applies to software. In particular, do customers really want software as a service like some software vendors would have you believe, or is this just another attempt to increase revenues or to do some accounting trick that makes things better for software companies?

I'm not convinced that some things are useful as a service. I have no interest at all in replacing my version of Microsoft Office with a software-as-a-service version of it, for example. Other applications, however, may make sense as a service, and many of these probably relate to security. This is because the controls that you need to run a reasonably-secure security application can be fairly expensive. This means that it may make sense to pay someone else to run a server for you in their secure data center. That way you're only paying part of the costs of the secure facility instead of all of it. If you're big enough to have your own secure facility, that may not be useful to you, but for many smaller businesses, some security applications seem to make sense as a service.

That's probably why most of the customers of Voltage's software-as-a-service offering, Voltage Security Network, are smaller companies. Not all of them are, of course, and the larger ones have an entirely different set of reasons for liking VSN, but the smaller ones seem to use VSN to avoid the costs of running their own key server, provisioning users, software distribution and overall systems management. For the smaller businesses, VSN is probably a good example of a software as a service offering that makes sense. Are there any other obvious examples where it's clearly better to use software as a service instead of licensing and running the software yourself?