I wanted to outline the seemingly vague differences between these two. SaaS isn’t really a new term. Software a as service has been “mainstream” since I’d say around 2005. Salesforce.com is the popular example of this, and some even suggest that facebook and myspace are examples of SaaS products.

PaaS - Platform as a Service, is really a concept I spoke about in the video below. It provides the basic set of resources, usually storage, memory, and CPU for a dedicated task or project. Some PaaS companies go one step further and give you the software-based infrastruture to create your own SaaS project. Overall, I think PaaS will gain A LOT of popularity over the next few years. We are seeing SaaS itself being increasly deployed among all organization small to large.

The offering of PaaS provides a Katana instead of the pearing knife with SaaS. It’s the extra few bells and whistles that improves a great tool to make it deadly.

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