Monday, March 13, 2006

Here comes HaaS

Nick Carr writes "There's been a ton of discussion about the delivery of software applications as subscription services over the internet. The software-as-a-service, or SaaS, model is pretty easy for people to understand - most everyone these days uses a browser to tap into web services of one sort or another - and the spread of the idea has benefited greatly from the charisma of promoters like Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff.

Much less discussed has been the idea of buying IT hardware - or even an entire data center - as a pay-as-you-go subscription service that scales up or down to meet your needs. But as a result of rapid advances in hardware virtualization, IT automation, and usage metering and pricing, I think the concept of hardware-as-a-service - let's call it HaaS - may at last be ready for prime time."

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