Software as a Service continues to gain momentum in the area of collaboration and knowledge management as decision-makers become more comfortable with the ideas of having their information stored offsite, not having to worry about security or accessibility, and entrusting others with the overall performance of their mission-critical systems. In this post we'll address that last one: performance.
A major problem with installed software when comparing it to hosted software is that it takes quite a while to develop new releases, and so new technologies, methodologies, and simple (yet brilliant) ideas may wait for two of those long release cycles (since the current release is already set) before they end up in the product. Releases for hosted software can be days, rather than months.
Case in point, we are working on a few new features that are aimed at improving the overall performance of the BrainKeeper application. By forging a partnership with the IT teams of our subscribers, we were able to focus on the areas that we wanted to target- and we have seen some great preliminary results.
Another point along these lines is that we were only able to develop these improvements quickly and get the desired performance boost because we developed our application from scratch. Building an enterprise wiki on top of an open-source platform can work, but knowing every function has a number of great advantages.
This is why Software as a Service works as well as it does; by being a partner with your clients, having an environment where you can release enhancements when clients need them- not when it is convenient, and having improvements made by the same people who developed the core architecture- you are served much better than with traditional software. Especially with a Web 2.0 application like an enterprise wiki, such as BrainKeeper.
