On-demand in plain English

One of the best resources for software industry people to learn

more about about on-demand software is Amy Wohl's weekly IBM PartnerWorld blog on Succeeding with Software as a Service. Or rather, it was, because sadly Amy announced this week she has just written her last in the series — just when I'd gotten around to linking to it from here!

Amy has been around the software industry almost since before it started, and like me she has been following SaaS ever since it first appeared. Unlike me, she never minces her words or ends up just sounding pretentious. I don't always agree with what Amy has to say about software services, but it's quite possible those are the occasions where she is right and I'm wrong ...

Fortunately the archive of the IBM blog remains online and is a mine of useful insights and information. Here's a sampling of posts that I can recommend:

• Enterprise SaaS
• SaaS versus Free Software 
• But How Will We Make Money?
• Is SaaS About New Applications or New Forms of Distribution? 
• SaaS versus the Storm
• How Big is an SaaS Customer?
• How to Introduce Users to Software as a Service
• SaaS is Based on Service 

There are other good ones in there, too, especially from the first half of last year when Amy was covering the basic ground for her new readers.

Amy is still writing about the software industry as a whole with great insight — as she has done for longer than I've been using software — from her own site, so I'm sure these are not the last insights she'll be providing into the evolution of on-demand software and software-as-a-service.