So many things have gotten the "aaS" (as-a-service) suffix in the past year that it's hard to imagine anything new or noteworthy being added to the list at this point. But I'm starting to think that a new flavor of "aaS" (yes, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this...) may well be in the works. I'll spare you the mental anguish of a new acronym. We can just call it what it is: hosted beta testing, or beta-software-as-a-service.

Hosted beta testing may not be new. But it's far from the norm. It's an underutilized (to say the least) alternative to the usual "Go fly our kite in a storm and report back to us" type of beta testing. I think it could catch on bigtime, though, for many of the same reasons SaaS has gotten so much traction lately.

Content management vendor Vignette, it turns out, is placing a major bet on "beta-SaaS." The company says that ahead of the next major release of their flagship Vignette Content Management offering, beta customers will be able to take advantage of something called the Vignette Virtual Environment (VVE) Program (known in Austin as "the sandbox"). The company says that VVE will provides beta testers with virtualized instances of V-next running on a full technology stack, with a great deal of infrastructure already configured, so that testers can hit the ground running.

According to the company, "Beta customers will be able to take control of the environment as though it is an on-premise deployment," meaning (among other things) that customers can write to the APIs, deploy custom components, and try various kinds of customizations and reconfigurations as part of the beta-test experience. It is, in fact, just what it sounds like: SaaS beta.

Of course, it's not going to be a panacea for every customer and every use-case. If you're running a highly customized install on an enterprise stack that's not replicated in one of VVE's VMWare images, or if you've done a lot of integration work involving, say, some of your company's various "remote systems," you won't be able to test everything the way you want it in the Vignette Virtual Environment. You're a candidate for orthodox you-host-it beta testing, in that case.

Nevertheless, you can expect to test a surprising number of use-cases -- including important things like user acceptance of new UI features -- in VVE fairly quickly, and uncover serious data- and app-migration problems early on, without having first spent a ton of time and effort setting up an in-house sandbox of your own.

Vignette is quick to admit that for some types of testing, a customer-controlled on-site environment is essential. But for getting a handle on major new functionalities -- and for finding out quickly whether your content contributors, admins, power users, and developers are going to run into any showstoppers -- the VVE approach will likely prove useful.

Meanwhile, it's a potential cost- and time-saver for customers. There are, after all, significant hardware and software implementation costs involved in standing up even a relatively modest beta test environment. With a hosted beta, the vendor eats the setup and operational costs. The customer comes in with guns blazing. Everyone gets where they need to go a little bit faster.

The vendor, meanwhile, gets something very valuable out of all this: namely, better-quality test results. The environment can be monitored; if something goes awry, it can be investigated "on-site" immediately. The vendor doesn't have to try to replicate the customer's environment. It removes a lot of guesswork. One of the typical problems with beta-test programs is that once the software leaves the vendor's physical control, the vendor never really knows how it's being used. Which parts of the product might the customer be over-testing? Under-testing? Which peculiarities of the customer's infrastructure might be introducing anomalies? Manifold ambiguities accompany customer-site beta testing. Anything that reduces that ambiguity makes the process more valuable.

It will be interesting to see how the Vignette Virtual Environment (VVE) Program fares when it's "put to the test" later this year -- assuming Open Text doesn't have other ideas, of course. (The VVE project is already funded and work has begun on it, but the Vignette acquisition hasn't yet closed, and it's always possible Open Text could nix the program.)

If the program goes forward as planned, and it results in a higher quality product in a shorter period of time, it'll be a big win for the concept of beta-SaaS, and a welcome development for Vignette customers, as well (something a lot of Vignette customers could use right about now).