Kyle Smith

One of the main selling points of software as a service is that people don’t want to maintain their software and don’t want to worry about security. There are plenty of services out there today that people love to use — Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook, Twitter, Flickr, IBM’s Dogear and Plaxo.

I’ve had my own domain name and web site for almost 8 years and in recent years I’ve grown tired of maintaining the various software packages that my site is comprised of — WordPress, Gallery 2, WikkaWiki, and others. Software as a service is a partial solution to this.

The problem with the current generation of services is none of them are integrated all that well. I don’t really want 7 distinct services to manage and keep up to date. It’s no more efficient than maintaining the software myself.

I would like to see those service providers team up with web hosting companies to offer an integrated solution where the hosting provider provides a breadboard of sorts that the services plug into. The hosting provider would be responsible for my site, including billing, but the actual functionality of the site would be provided by the service providers.

If that vision isn’t working for you, think of the hosting provider as an EJB container (which provides all the common supporting services you want) and the service providers as the developers of the add-on components (the actual EJBs) that are deployed in the container. I like this notion even more, because it suggests that if I’m not happy with a particular service, I can swap it out for another that’s written to the same API.

No more building your site from scratch and then trying to integrate it. You log in to your hosting provider, pick your domain registrar, your webmail provider (Gmail, Squirrel Mail), your photo management solution (Flickr, Picassa, Gallery), etc. and then click the Make It So button.