To or Not to SAAS? (Software AS A Service)

There were days when BIG companies only rented out computers and refused sell them.SaaS is different from this as the new age players help, shield, the users from the pain of doing everything themselves and the users are more than happy to use the service as it is one important thing, they need not worry about!

As of now SaaS seems to be working fine, but will this change? We will obviously have to wait & see. But as a small business owner I would answer a few questions before jumping into SAAS boat.

How comfortable I am knowing that all my accounting informtaion is in some place on the internet and available to me only if I pay up?(after all I am responsible to the Feds!)

How sure, that all my business leads are backed up?(Murphys' Law that too when I have no control)

How sure, that my customers' personal information is leak proof?(there can be few bad apples anywhere and I have limited control)

What would be the best time to hear that the SaaS provider is closing and I need to move to another?(we have seen many very big s/w vendors announcing EOS)

How sure, that my services/data is not accessed by my competitor?(almost everything is just a password away)

How can I cut down software expenses temporarily?(of course lean periods are a reality)

I am definitely not questioning the SaaS capabilities,a great fan of web 2.0, but just checking my comfort levels using SaaS. As developing and maintaing all the required software is time consuming and expensive, SaaS is gaining popularity. But if software development is made easy, affordable & robust would you still be using SaaS for your serious business needs?

Even I use SaaS for picture Sharing.

For faster desktop software development use lyteRAD.

What do you use your Mobile phone for?

Ofcourse apart from making calls & playing games.The handset vendors pushing more & more powerful hardware into your hands, what are you using it for? Coming to list of killer Apps on the phones, a browser with GPRS will cover a host of websets that you access on your phone,then comes the office docs/calendar/email integration, oh yeah the IMs(innovative? SMS apps to a
id instead of ph no...) are the hottest software for the PDA from quite some time and there are zillions of variations being added to these as you read. These cannot be a killer apps forever. Andriod may bring a new different breed of software but we will have to wait a while for that. What now? We already have a handset..

Are you ready for lyteMobile..? Presenting the killer app for Mobile - lyteMobile.

Its a free midlet with which you can use build applications that YOU need on your Mobile. You build table and forms to access them within minutes with zero coding. You can add, browse & edit records of a table, send records via SMS. True! You can build & use your own application on your mobile all you need is only the lyteMobile midlet. So what...

Imagine you need an application to track your expenses on your Mobile see a how to make one here. You might want another application to track the hits on your website, yes you can build that in minutes using lyteMobile.You can sync your data on lyteMobile with a desktop application, using lyteRAD.

lyteMobile is free and can be downloaded from here.

It works on all the midlet managers that support file access API(jsr75).lyteMobile midlet needs blanket permissions to read and write into files which many of the midlet managers provide on most of the PDAs. On the phones that do not give blanket permission to midlets there is a series of questions asked while accessing the files which is annoying. Permission questions are good, but there should be a way to skip them when you trust a midlet. J2ME specification currently forces any application vendor to spend a fortune for this(Java Verified Program, trusted midlets, code signing ...).It is this flawed approach of J2ME which is limiting itself.

BTW I am using lyteMobile on windows Mobile smart phone with Esmertecs' jbed midlet manager and works like a dream.