Is #SaaS the New #Intranet?

The ability of the Internet to facilitate communication and collaboration within an enterprise is nothing new. Back in the day, the Internet as we know it did not exist. By our current standards, information and data moved at a snail’s pace and the security standards simply did not exist. As a result, companies needed to have their own “private” internets known as intranets.

This clearly required massive investments and was not easily accessed by ‘remote users’. As broadband grew and security increased, it slowly became the case that the capabilities of the internet met and likely exceeded the capability of many intranets – and this does not even consider the scalability of the modern Internet.

The irony (reluctantly used incorrectly) is that the term intranet was understood to refer to internal functionality and usage rather than the actual infrastructure used to support it.

So the million dollar question is…

If solutions like SmartSimple can provide workflow management, communication and collaboration tools, knowledge share functionality and so on (without compromising the integrity of data or security and with the added benefit of scalability), is SaaS the new intranet?