Clients in the News: Perhaps the biggest trend to rock the SPC world in recent years is Software as a Service (SaaS): a software licensing and deployment model in which the software is centrally hosted, usually accessed via web browser, and licensed on a subscription basis.
One company touting this new model is InfinityQS, a longtime SPC software provider that introduced their SaaS offering, Enact, a couple of years ago. Doug Fair, chief operating officer at InfinityQS, says that Enact and other Cloud-based, real-time SPC platforms are the way of the future for in-process quality control, though SaaS has been somewhat slow to catch on.
“Our engineers will go out and work with clients who still have Windows XP or even Windows 95, because it’s expensive to upgrade to newer software,” Fair says. “But now, you don’t even need a computer; you can have an operator running our software on a cellphone. And there’s nothing to install; it’s not an app. It’s just a link to a web page, which you can access from any browser and from any device.”