Transitioning to Software as a Service: Realigning Software Engineering Practices with the New Business Model

Abstract

Transitioning from software as a good to software as a service is not simply a matter of developing appropriate protocols, adopting new service-oriented technologies, and writing code. Instead, software companies that seek to adapt to a market based on software as a service need to examine how they approach very basic business tasks like marketing and engineering. This paper focuses on the implications a particular software paradigm has on software engineering. It concludes that some traditional software engineering practices in the goods paradigm related to planning, versioning, and maintenance are simply not appropriate in the service paradigm. To be successful as a service-oriented business, a software company needs to realign its base software engineering practices to fit the new business model