History of Software as a Service Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is seen as an interesting new emerging technology, but cloud computing has actually been around for decades in the form of software-as-a-service or SaaS for short. Now, SaaS is a form of software licensing and delivery where software is centrally hosted over the internet for others to use and usually licensed on a subscription basis. As techradar.com puts it in an article written by Brian Turner, “SaaS, is a cloud-based service where instead of downloading software your desktop PC or business network to run and update, you instead access an application via an internet browser. The software application could be anything from office software to unified communications among a wide range of other business apps that are available.”

This form of cloud computing dates all the way back in the 1960s starting with the company IBM and other mainframe providers. They provided services such as database storage to organizations worldwide using the power of computer networks. They offered storage from their worldwide data centers to different organizations like banks and colleges. Eventually, expansion of the internet in the 1990s and the opening of the world wide web to the civilian population allowed for new forms of SaaS cloud computing & new classes of centralized computing, one of which was called application service providing or ASP for short. This allowed business applications to be provided over the internet to reduce cost for specialized business and personal applications. Many times, SaaS services were managed and hosted by a third-party while a main company maintained datacenters that cloud be connected to over the internet. However, most companies offering SaaS cloud computing develop and manage their own software.

There are plenty of SaaS cloud computing services that people probably use currently without even knowing that they are taking advantage of cloud computing. One of these services is Dropbox: a service that allows people to save files and documents over the internet in a remote datacenter. Gmail is another example since it is a software-as-a-service email provider that is offered by Google and Google Drive (Google’s own file storage service) counts too. Skype and plenty of other online messaging services are SaaS too, showing how much cloud computing affects our lives without us even knowing, all because IBM and a bunch of other companies came up with a way to share services over the internet back in the 1960s.

In addition to SaaS, there is a unique type of software-as-a-service cloud computing known as OpenSaaS. OpenSaaS is a form of software as a service that is based around open-source code. The web application generated by the open-source code is hosted, supported, and maintained by a service provider. Upgrades and product enhancements to the web app are managed by the central authority, but a community of general users define the roadmap and developments within the code itself. The term OpenSaaS was originally coined by Dries Buytaert, creator of the Drupal (a free and open-source content management framework created in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License) in 2011. There are many people who are advocates for the increase use of OpenSaaS cloud computing. One of these individuals is Andrew Hoppin, former Chief Information Officer for the New York State Senate. He once referred to this particular form of cloud computing as "the future of government innovation". He pointed to WordPress as an example of OpenSaaS where the code for WordPress is open-source so practically anyone can create a similar service, but the main WordPress service you can use online is maintained by the WordPress Foundation. To him, things like WordPress give people "the best of both worlds, and more options. The fact that it is open source means that they can start building their websites by self-hosting WordPress and customizing their website to their heart’s content. Concurrently, the fact that WordPress is SaaS means that they don’t have to manage the website at all -- they can simply pay WordPress.com to host it."