ASP versus SaaS: What?

I love what I do for a living and after many years of ERP, CRM, HRMS….I am consistently happy about new non-enterprise software. The technology that is so far removed, yet impacts my (our) everyday life is amazing—Atheros, Intel, Wind River, Devicescape—or the technology that is so close and familiar like Facebook, MySpace and "Apple" (I need to put Apple in quotes b/c it is super cool technology but closed, expensive and exclusive—in branding), Slacker and more are for the consumer and the benefit of the masses.

At the end of the day, be it the enterprise consumer (yes there is the CTO…COO…that wants to drive economies of scale and cost reduction down), or the traditional consumer…it is all about making life easy with technology.

While I am writing about random enterprise and non-enterprise software, my original thought was ASP versus SaaS.

As a PR person I consistently remember ASP (so long ago, but just blogging about it now). Yet, ASP and SasS are the same thing, but ASP is the original “category” defined by some individual that is now gone. Why did SaaS take off over the ASP? I don’t mean to appear questionable, but as an individual in the industry….I literally hear one thing and think…wasn’t it that other thing just a few year ago and aren't they the same thing? Was the branding for SaaS that good? I am impressed by category creation. I know the ASP/SaaS argument has been had…but I sill tend to thing: WOW…the power of thought, category and a solid budget.

The definitions from Wikipedia are below…

An application service provider (ASP) is a business that provides computer-based services to customers over a network. Software offered using an ASP model is also sometimes called On-demand software or software as a service (SaaS). The most limited sense of this business is that of providing access to a particular application program (such as medical billing) using a standard protocol such as HTTP.

Software as a service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'Sass') is a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. By eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer's own computer, SaaS alleviates the customer's burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support.