Impending DST Disruption Highlights the Benefits of One-to-Many Software Delivery

Mar 6, 2007 by Matt Ammerman

Here’s another spotlight article from Phil Wainewright on ZDNet – DST spells disaster for shrinkwrap software.

The article zeroes in on the impending daylight savings time change (it’s this weekend in case you didn’t know – a date earlier than any prior year), and the havoc that it has wreaked on on-premise, aka ‘shrinkwrap’, software end users who must now navigate through patches and updates to accomodate the change.

The DST implications definitely illustrate an end user benefit derived from the SaaS delivery model.  Software built to support one-to-many delivery requires major patches or upgrades – planned or unexpected – be made only to the one running instance of the application core.  We often highlight the key economical benefits of SaaS for the vendors and end users alike – but it’s incidents like this that make us take a closer look at how SaaS might smooth out technological operations when they might otherwise become a disruptive nuisance.

What are some of the other, perhaps lesser known, ancillary benefits that SaaS end users have experienced since making the move from on-premise to hosted enterprise software? What other headaches have you avoided by using SaaS apps? We’d love to know your thoughts!