Technology Focus Part 1 To Host or Not To Host?

By Ernie Schell

What is "software?" The easy answer is a computer program designed to execute one or more specified functions. But in 2006, the reality is that there is no easy answer.

Over the past five years, there's been a revolution in the so-called "software as a service" (SaaS) arena. This is something of a throwback to the 1970s and before, when a centralized mainframe served selected views of software programs to a user's "dumb terminal." The terminals were "dumb" because they did no computing. You entered data into the interface and the mainframe did the computing, sending the results back to your terminal.