In the business world, SaaS (Software as a Service) is all the rage these days. In the consumer world, Web 2.0 is “the thing.” Fortunately for us at Helpstream, when we started developing our service, both of these trends were well underway. As a result, we were able to design a service that takes the best of both elements. We are calling it “SaaS 2.0.”

The first generation of SaaS applications – what we call SaaS 1.0 – are basically legacy apps moved to the Web. These apps mirror the look and basic functionality of the old legacy apps while giving customers dollar savings on total cost of ownership (TCO) driven largely by the benefits of multi-tenancy. That’s certainly attractive, but SaaS 2.0 is a different animal, leveraging not only the inherent cost-savings associated with Web delivery, but actually leveraging technologies to provide users with a rich user experience and connectedness that didn’t exist until the emergence of consumer-oriented Web 2.0 offerings.

One of those Web 2.0 technologies is known as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). AJAX allows today’s developers to build rich Internet applications that feel extremely interactive and responsive to users. AJAX typically involves, among other things, the exchange of small amounts of data between a web page and a server, resulting in a level of performance and responsiveness not experienced with typical SaaS 1.0 applications.

Social networking and user-generated content are other by-products of the Web 2.0 movement. It’s hard to think of a consumer Internet service these days that doesn’t enable users to connect with other users and generate their own content, whether it’s a YouTube video or a restaurant review. The combination of social networking and user-generated content has resulted in a very powerful concept known as collective intelligence. By leveraging the collective intelligence of a community, users are getting smarter, faster.

SaaS 2.0 offerings incorporate these Web 2.0 capabilities to deliver a different type of application experience than available with legacy enterprise applications. Take, for example, our Helpstream service. By taking advantage of the flexibility and scalability of SaaS, and leveraging AJAX to deliver a rich user experience, we are able to deliver a modern support solution that can deliver a vastly superior experience to customers.

In addition, the Helpstream service will free customers from being completely dependent on agents and/or articles in a Knowledge Base. In an upcoming version, users will be able to contribute their own experiences and expertise into the Knowledge Base and interact with other users to create collective intelligence that benefits everyone—including agents. This will bring solutions to problems more quickly and will increase the number of problems that can be resolved by users themselves--reducing dependency on agents.

All in all, we feel that the combination of SaaS and Web 2.0 is a powerful one, and that SaaS 2.0 is the future of business applications.