I've been reading lots of online articles recently and yes, everyone is well and truly in the clouds. Seeing lots of interesting marketing as well, one that specifically caught my mind is vendors touting that they have a multi-tenanted architecture and that other hosted solutions are ASP model and then going in depth into this. I thought to myself - from a business perspective "who cares"?

If I am a customer paying for a SaaS/Hosted solution, then I dont really care about the details of the implementation do I? What I'm more concerned about is the reliability, credibility and impact that the service is going to have on my business (hopefully positive). When trying to explain the differences to a non-technical person, it is almost the same as trying to explain the differences between object oriented programming and procedural programming - a great discussion but again to a non-techie - who cares?

Like all approaches, each has its strengths and weaknesses, but we should always remember what the business is asking for and ultimately paying for.