I was reading a white paper today that was produced by a colleague about Software as a Service (SaaS) and realised that sometimes, even those pushing the whole SaaS idea don’t really understand what it is really all about.

This of course leads to confusion and in some cases fear which in turn stops people taking these services up en mass.

So the article I was reading spent a lot of time telling us how providing software as a service was all about thin client technology and VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) but I actually believe that if you are trying to embrace the “cloud” way of working, this is actually the last thing you want to do.

So lets look at a recent press release.

The publishers of the Guardian newspaper have implemented Google’s enterprise-level web-based applications.

A second major British newspaper (the Telegraph took this route last year) has embraced the whole SaaS idea and the cloud approach and are now using Google Apps Premium Edition for documents, calendar, video and talk. They are also adding in Google mail.

Now there is a great article in IT Pro here if you want the full breakdown on this however the importance is that they are not spending a small fortune on thin client technology or VDi. All they need to deploy is a desktop or laptop PC with a connection to the internet and a browser. That’s it!

If they want to set up a whole new office, all you need to do is make sure there is access to the internet (remembering of course that mobile broadband is common place) and bingo, you are away.

So why is everybody still pushing VDI (which is really just the old thin client technology that has jumped on the virtualisation hype band wagon) when in 2009, you simply don’t need it?