SaaS as a software protection strategy

02 October 2009

Source: http://www.extranetevolution.com/extranet_evolution/

Reading WorldCAD Access and The CAD Industry blogs this morning, I learned about the latest developments in a court case brought by Autodesk to stop an eBay trader, Tim Vernor, from selling second-hand CAD software. Ignoring the complex issues relating to copyright, it occurred to me that other software vendors are already side-stepping such issues by delivering their software as a service.

Instead of distributing disks or enabling software downloads to users' local machines, hosting the application 'in the cloud' and allowing users to access the solution and its related data via the internet effectively prevents any end-user from gaining access to the underlying software code. This wasn't a vendor benefit that I had previously identified as inherent to the SaaS model, but alongside the other advantages of SaaS - faster development and testing, easier deployment, quicker upgrades or patching, economies of scale, more efficient support, etc - perhaps protection of the vendor's intellectual property should also be another reason to embrace the SaaS approach.