It's hard to talk about infrastructure as a service and platform as a service without mentioning software
as a service software as a service really doesn't have much to do with virtualization but given its
name I feel kind of obligated to talk to you about it right now.
In fact software as a service predates virtualization.
It's been around a while.
The cornerstone about software as a service is that instead of having a CD that you buy at the store
or whatever online and sticking it in your computer and installing the software you instead buy a subscription
and then this subscription allows you to download x number of copies and do whatever you want to do
with them.
So software as a service gets rid of optical media and things like that first of all which is kind of
handy now probably one of the more famous versions of software as a service and something I personally
use is Microsoft's Office 365.
When you write books for a living use a lot of Microsoft Word and I'm always moving and changing computers
and things like that.
And I can never keep track of all my optical media.
So for me I just get a subscription I pay I think it's $99 a year and I can install Office on up to
five computers and five tablets.
So for me it's really convenient.
In fact I can even share one of mine with a family member or something like that so that software as
a service.
Now I need to be careful here because the description I just gave you is what I'm thinking that Conti
is going to use this software as a service but I'm going to challenge you with something to me there's
a whole other way to look at software as a service.
For example applications like oh I don't know Dropbox with Dropbox I can store stuff online.
It is a subscription.
I have to subscribe to Dropbox.
They don't just let anybody on there but it has good controls and I can access my stuff anywhere so
it doesn't really download software on my computer but it provides an application a service that I can
use anywhere.
So to me things like Dropbox GS Google Docs Google Maps all of these tools are in my opinion also examples
of software as a service.
So I can't really guarantee which way the company is going to be looking at things but make sure you
understand both ways I've just described software as a service.