Saas - Is it there?

SaaS, an acronym for Software as a Service, continues to evolve in the market today. Any project or program manager involved with software application implementation needs to be very familiar with SaaS. But any project manager on any project where there are systems involved with managing any aspect of the project will also benefit by being familiar with SaaS. In this post, I simply want to highlight a few high points that I have learned recently about the state of the SaaS evolution.


Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming much more pervasive. However, it is doing so especially in certain markets, certain applications, and certain functionality. Specifically, Saas is especially taking off in the following:

1. the small to medium organization market where businesses can take advantage of the low upfront costs to get started, the low total cost of ownership, and the avoidance of building infrastructure internally,
2. the more popular applications include human resource management, customer relationship management (CRM), and a host of other smaller market applications, including project management, and
3. parts of applications are migrating to SaaS delivery — an example would a specialized application within a business that would then leverage Saas-delivered communication and collaboration capabilities.

What does this mean for all of us as project managers? It means that there is a whole set of evolving capabilities out there that we can take advantage of, and that we need to think strategically about how we might employ SaaS as part of our projects. There is much to get our arms around regarding SaaS. There are many issues when it comes to marketing software and the place that SaaS might have in a product line. This would be of especially high concern to a program manager involved with the delivery of a software product line. You can find a great deal of information on a terrific and insightful free podcast simply called Software as a Service (SaaS) that is part of the McKinsey "On High Tech" podcast series available on iTunes.

GOOGLE BARCODE

Google Celebrates the patent Barcode invention by displaying "Barcode Logo" at Google Search Home Page, Barcode Logo to remark Barcodes 57th Anniversary at Google (www.google.com) as on 07th Oct, 2009.

On decoding "Barcode Logo" image it say's GOOGLE.



Barcode Information Source Wikipedia

A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data. Originally, bar codes represented data in the widths (lines) and the spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1D (1 dimensional) barcodes or symbologies.


They also come in patterns of squares, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns within images termed 2D (2 dimensional) matrix codes or symbologies. Although 2D systems use symbols other than bars, they are generally referred to as barcodes as well.

A UPC-A barcode symbol.

The first use of barcodes was to label railroad cars, but they were not commercially successful until they were used to automate supermarket checkout systems, a task in which they have become almost universal. Their use has spread to many other roles as well, tasks that are generically referred to as Auto ID Data Capture (AIDC). Other systems are attempting to make inroads in the AIDC market, but the simplicity, universality and low cost of barcodes has limited the role of these other systems. It costs about half a United States cent (US$0.005) to implement a barcode compared to passive RFID which still costs about $0.07 to $0.30 per tag.^[1] Barcodes can be read by optical scanners called barcode readers, or scanned from an image by special software. Scanning software for 2D codes is built-in to or available for many mobile phones, and is especially popular in Japan, India & Europe.

Check out Google Search Home Page Logo's on previous occasions and get info on when Google has honored & displayed logos at their Search Home Page.