-1

As I am largely self taught I often struggle with knowing the terminology surrounding something I logically understand, which can cause difficulty when I want to research more about it.

I (think I) know that an online service/API that your application can communicate with (e.g. through http) but which sits on another company's server falls under SaaS but may have a more specific name I am unaware of. How is this distinguished from an application you download and install on your own server and still communicate with through an API e.g. PredictionIO?

It is very difficult to word a question when essentially I am saying 'I have literally no idea what I am talking about can you please steer me in the right direction' so I apologise for how poorly this is asked but that is what makes it so difficult to google!

What I am looking for is the keywords I need to conduct my own investigation and perhaps some good high level resources so I can familiarise myself with the classifications

Thank you

user2071737
  • 53
  • 1
  • 7

1 Answers1

0

While PredictionIO is a great product (or was not sure after SalesForce acquisition), I wouldn't call that SaaS. Most people refer to SaaS as a true hosted solution where a customer only needs to log in and create an account to get started. PredictionIO still requires infrastructure, management of VMs, etc.

Examples of SaaS would be Dropbox, Crashlytics, MixPanel, Sumo Logic, SalesForce, Stripe, etc.

Derrick
  • 1,508
  • 11
  • 8
  • My question really was what would you then classify it as? – user2071737 Oct 18 '16 at 09:45
  • I guess not really a good answer. I would call it just an open source tool. No different than rabbitMQ, Apache Spark or Elastic Search. Many open source tools also leverage RESTful APIs to communicate with. RESTful APIs is not a requirement to being called SaaS nor does it mean the product is SaaS. – Derrick Oct 18 '16 at 18:31
  • Great, even that helps as it is a sanity check that 'open source tool' is sufficient terminology and I am not missing something. Thank you – user2071737 Oct 19 '16 at 12:14