We live in a world that has changed the way it consumes applications. The last few years have seen a rapid rise in the adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Much of this can be attributed to the broad success of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is said to have grown revenue from $3.1B to $5B last year (Forbes). More and more people, enterprise customers included, are consuming applications and resources that require little to no maintenance. And any maintenance that does happen, now goes unnoticed by users. This leaves traditional software vendors contending to find a way to adapt their distribution models to make their software easier to consume. Lengthy, painful upgrades are no longer acceptable to users, forcing vendors to create a solution to this problem.

Let’s face it, the impact of this on traditional software companies are starting to be felt. Their services and methods of doing business are now being compared to a newer, more efficient model. One that is not bogged down by the inefficiencies of the traditional model. SaaS has the advantage that the software runs in their datacenters, where they have easy access to it, control the hardware, the architecture, the configurations, and so on.