It was a funny week last week. It seems everybody wants to announce Software as a Service websites.
The first SaaS experience I had was over a cup of coffee with Mark from MyWorkSpace on Tuesday. I like to hear what smaller, Australian operations have to offer and this one seems quite good application.
On the Wednesday I went to the Telstra-Microsoft Joint Venture announcement. This was a strange beast as the current T-Suite services are simply managed Exchange and Sharepoint and in that don’t seem to be anything new over what Telstra was reselling from WebCentral until recently.
The main thrust of the press conference was that you’d be able to do this on a mobile phone.
Unfortunately none of the mobile phone manufacturers has had an opportunity to put Telstra’s new application on their Windows Mobile smartphones, which meant we only saw demonstrations and had no opportunity to try it ourselves.
From a distance it appears the mobile service is just the same synchronisation tool you get with a Windows Mobile device setup to use the Telstra servers.
On a positive side, both the MyWorkSpace and the T-Suite applications are reasonably priced and a good deal for smaller businesses, particularly those start ups wanting to save cash.
In my Smart Company column tomorrow l’m explaining what SaaS, cloud computing and Web 2.0 mean.
The funny thing with all of this is everything is new again. We’re going back to the 1970s way of running computers.