History

Software as a service's acronym, SaaS, first appears in an article called "Strategic Backgrounder: Software as a Service." It was published in February 2001 by the Software & Information Industry's (SIIA) eBusiness Division. This 18 page document is one of the most complete essays pertaining to SaaS available today. SIIA developed the backgrounder to analyze the current state of the SaaS market and its near term prospects, and to provide insight for its members who may be profoundly impacted by changes implied in the SaaS mode. Software as a service is essentially an extension of the idea of the Application Service Provider (ASP) model.^[3]

One of the first SaaS applications was SiteEasy, a web-site-in-a-box for small businesses, that launched in 1998 at Siteeasy.com. Developed by Atlanta-based firm WebTransit (co-founded by Gary Troutman and Drew Wilkins), SiteEasy was sold on a subscription-basis for a monthly fee to its first customer in the Fall of 1998.^[4]

Loudcloud, founded in 1999 by Marc Andreessen, was one of the first to attempt to commercialize Software as a Service computing with an Infrastructure as a Service model.^[5] The technology also was called "ASP's" or Application Service Providers, under the terminology of the day. Loudcloud changed its name to Opsware after selling the operations side of the business to EDS in 2002, and HP acquired Opsware in 2007^[6] and EDS in 2008.^[7] HP now offers the SaaS originally developed by Loudcloud as HP Software-as-a-Service.