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SaaS in Public-Sector IT -- Part Two of Two

July 1, 2009 By Hilton Collins

The term "software as a service" and the acronym "SaaS" probably entered the IT lexicon somewhere around the turn of the century. According to the research report Service-Based Software: The Future for Flexible Software, which was written for the Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference in 2000, the words "software as a service" had been gaining steam since the Internet gave birth to a broad, open marketplace of "highly dynamic and agile" organizations that had to adapt if they wanted to compete globally. This necessitated the creation of more demand-centric software offerings provided over the Web.

Today SaaS is a common term in the IT world for applications that are installed on hosts' servers, as opposed to "on-premise" applications you've installed on yours. And SaaS, as a means to deliver software to organizations, has enhanced the way some governments inform the public, just like it has in Indiana.

The Indiana Office of Technology uses the company RightNow's on-demand CRM services to offer dynamically driven frequently asked questions (FAQs) across 75 state agencies. These FAQs are "dynamic" instead of "static" because the way they're organized changes from page to page, so the questions most viewed by visitors are positioned higher in FAQ lists on different agency pages.

"In this particular circumstance, we had the software experts hosting and managing the software for us, so we were able to get it very quickly," said Robert Paglia, a program manager at IN.gov, the state's Web portal. He said the solution has been in use since 2007, and Indiana pays about $60,000 annually for it. "We purchased this as an enterprise solution, and that saved us a lot of money because if each one of our agencies would have purchased this software separately, obviously we would have had separate installations and many instances of this," he said.

RightNow also powers a live chat module on the state portal that users can access over the Web to communicate with state personnel. Paglia is pleased with both tools.

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Gartner: SaaS Revenue to Grow 18 Percent in 2009

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