Time of expendable business software is coming

Can you imagine buying business software as expandable items?

Chosing from a large selection available in some software marketplace, getting it to run in one minute, and starting to work on your business issue a moment later.

No lenghty evalutions, analysing risks, preparing for integration etc. - just find it, start up and do your work.

Forget also about paying at least hundreds of dollars per license and additional 20-30% for maintenance. Imagine getting it for a fraction of that.

And finally disposing of it without regret after your job is completed - whether it is four months or two weeks.

That's the direction we are heading with SaaS applications.

That's also the model gaining popularity with app stores available for smarphones like iPhone and Android-based.

Why can't we use business software in that way, yet?

Yes, some possibilities are already available. A growing number of web-based apps can do your work in many cases.

SaaS model popularized by salesforce.com is getting traction pretty rapidly. Together with the idea of cloud computing. Pretty soon HTML5 will make web-based applications much more functional.

However, some problems still remain unresolved - mainly security, data portability and integration/interoperability with legacy systems - old applications still dominating business IT environments.

But the time of expandable business applications is coming. Maybe it's time to start preparing for it?