It was a pleasure to be part of Scotland’s first Software as a Service (or SAAS as it’s known in the geek world) focus group yesterday, where a number of leading IT software and service leaders met up to discuss the state of the SAAS market.

For a quick summary of what SAAS actually is, check out Wikipedia, but essentially it’s the new (or not so new in some cases) trend of “renting” software via the web to customers, rather than the tradition sale of software as a physical product (a CD in a box) that the customer then owns.

The group has been brought together by STAC, whose remit is to support and encourage collaboration within the Scottish ICT and technology sector, and if the first meeting is any indication, the future of SAAS is bright. 

There’s clearly a lot already being done under the SAAS banner, and many companies (like ourselves with our NSBuilder and NSMail services) are currently deploying web-based software to the market with a high degree of success, however there’s lots to be done before SAAS truly competes with “traditional” sales and delivery of software, a fact that hasn’t gone unrecognised by Scottish Enterprise (also part of the focus group) who have at least pledged to support the concept of helping Scotland’s software developers thrive in the global SAAS markets - we’ll see.

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