What potential do you see for Online project management and SaaS in future?

With the growing number of small businesses/ distributed teams, increased broadband penetration, and 24×7 mobile work culture there is a potential future for online project management.Online project management tools are rightly poised to give teams an accurate view of how their projects are doing and help eliminate common problems that occur when multiple people are collaborating.

It helps to solve issues like lack of clarity ,project email spam,lost files, task accountability issues and will bring about work transparency.Project management are about people, conversations, relationships, sharing, execution and collaboration. Online project management tools will borrow a lot of principles from social networking services and bring them to the enterprise in the coming years.

Economically and technically it makes sense for a business to adopt SaaS. As its going to be a requirement for every business to adopt Web 2.0 tools and SaaS applications if it wants to compete in a global world.Going forward the browser will become the new OS and all functions within an enterprise will be delivered through various SaaS initiatives.

While usage of online PM and its related tools, SaaS are increasing, they still have a long way to catchup with the current methods of PM and application management.

For Indian market going online becomes a bit tough as our infrastructure is still not that agile to support such high tech stuff, both in terms of cost and volume

So these two would become an additional channel of managing businesses and projects rather than taking the driver's seat.

As India is looking for wider role in global economy, the wings are poised for spreading. The obvious relative robustness of its economic system (had smaller impact due to melt down) is pinning rather larger exposure for involvements in world economy. In this scenario, it is almost physically impossible to tackle the issues of project management on a personal basis. There is no choice for Indian enterpreneurs but to go in the online project management and SaaS to stay abreast and competative. Whether the present infra-structure supports or not is not the issue. The required IT infra-structures for internal use will be created if the demand is there, as has happened in communication in general over the last few years. There is NO-CHOICE.

Barring certain industry verticals, the potential is tremendous.

The ASP model would not be accepted by big organizations, but SaaS is where everything is headed.[Chrome OS won't be nothing more than a host for google chrome IMHO]

sectors like Oil & gas, Biotech etc. have their valid reasons to tread cautiously right now

SaaS is an new growing business model. SaaS moves grows faster than other companies. Needs more markeing and customer support. Its damn good business model.

However, before we opt for SaaS model we must know about the SaaS model provider and its software quality and support. What about data security? Say for example if one use CRM under SaaS model, the provider could go and grab all the CRM details. Coz everything is under the control of SaaS provider.