SaaS will make fat clients thin

If I was allowed to buy stock in a high tech company, which I am not due to the fact that I cover most of them, I would buy into a manufacturer of thin clients.

The more I cover SaaS [Software as a Service] the more I am convinced that over time the need for a fat client on the desktop will become unnecessary.

Two announcements this week alone have convinced me more than ever.

Salesforce.com announced its Apex programming language that will allow coders to create data models, automate business logic, and create interfaces without the need to tune it to any specific hardware, database or operating system. Salesforce takes care of that on the backend.

While Salesforce may be used by only say 20 percent of a company’s workforce now, if their IT department can start building other applications on the Salesforce platform that percentage is sure to rise.

Thus the urgency in designing an application for specific in-house servers, operating systems and networks–other than IP–goes away.

The second announcement only furthered my belief that we are heading into the cloud for most software. Also see my column, Tabblo’s approach to RIAs on this topic posted today.

Verizon Business, a unit of Verizon Communications, is also getting into the hosting SaaS services on its network.

If Salesforce.com still gives some large enterprise-level companies pause, concerned that their data center is not up to the job, certainly a telecommunications carrier offers an alternative any large company might consider.

Add AT&T data center hosting to the mix with its reputation for a secure environment and frankly, I don’t see a bright future for packaged applications sitting behind legacy firewalls that cost huge amounts of dollars to maintain.

The way I see it with more and more of software becoming a service, ala Web 2.0 if you will, the need for fat clients will almost disappear.

I’m telling you, buy thin.