I hate to dispel the myth that writing for Westblog is nothing but being fed eccles cakes by scantily-clad Revs girls, but what with the economy and all, those days of hedonistic abandon are long gone, and, actually, writing these posts can sometimes feel like a bit of a chore.

So happy is clam who discovers that someone else has written a really interesting piece on another blog, all about SaaS and ITSM, that can be brazenly hijacked and plagiarized for the purposes of Westblog… um… that provokes interesting thoughts about the things it mentions.

SaaS 3.0 and ITSM, Match Made in Heaven!!, is the piece, found over on Service Sphere‘s blog. Aside from the Guinness World Record™ for longest blog entry in history (seriously, I’ve read Salman Rushdie novels in less time), the piece is notable for the fact that it takes a long hard look at SaaS – the topic on everyone’s lips, seemingly – but only from the ITSM standpoint, which itself raises some interesting questions. After all, is the fact that we sat up and took notice of this piece an indication that other ongoing and general discussions about SaaS seem a little disconnected from ITSM? Is that because yes, of course it’s easy to see why it makes sense to have your word processing app or whatever in the cloud, but ITSM software is not the same beast as MS Word?

After all, you can send your mother a CD (or is DVD these days?) of the Office suite and reasonably expect her to be able to install it herself, with maybe only one or two panicked phonecalls about having read the entire user agreement but not quite understood all the technical terms. The same is patently not true for Service Manager 7. My preconception – and in this I may be completely wrong (it has been known, just ask my wife) – is that any software that requires significant deployment or installation assistance, will require it no matter what the delivery method of the software. And if that is the case, is that reliance on specific personalization at odds with what we think of as the SaaS model?

Well, I’m not the person to ask, because I don’t know enough to be able to present a cogent argument. If only there was some sort of link to someone else’s blog covering this very topic…

Tom

PS Does anyone else reallllllly want an eccles cake now, or is it just me?