Google alerts is a great way to keep track of references to a company or product (or any other search term you want to track). Whenever Google picks up a new site in relation to your search word they send an email. I just received a link to an article in the Australian newspaper The Age which talks about ASP/SaaS and mentions 24SevenOffice.
<blockquote>Other successful companies following the ASP (sorry, SaaS) model include NetSuite (backed by Oracle’s Larry Ellison) and 24SevenOffice, which offer financial software and other office applications.</blockquote>
The article introduces the concept of ASP/SaaS and states:
<blockquote>The 21st-century term is SaaS, or software as a service. Quietly, what they are doing has become the norm.</blockquote>
Exactly. I cannot understand why any business (particularly small/mid-sized) would want to buy software licenses, set-up their own servers, administrate and maintain all this. Except for advanced tasks like graphical processing (i.e AutoCAD, Photoshop) or heavy statistics (i.e. SPSS), most business applications can be delivered over the Internet through a web-application. Access anywhere. No need to worry about servers, backups, security etc. - all taken care of by the host. A lot cheaper. The advantages are numerous and far outweights the alternative.
Read the full article here.