The origin of Software as an Operation

Software as an Operation was coined in 2026 by Danilo Naranjo Emparanza, founder of Wingsoft, a digital product studio in Santiago, Chile, building custom software since 2008.

The observation behind the term is simple. After 18 years delivering software to companies in banking, retail and telecommunications, the pattern kept repeating: building stopped being the problem a long time ago. Operating never did. And while construction tools advanced at historic speed, millions of small businesses remained outside: not because they could not pay for construction, but because nobody offered them the operation.

The delivery stack had names for everything except that. IaaS, PaaS, FaaS, SaaS. And a gap: the model where the client does not adapt their business to a generic tool, does not write code, does not manage infrastructure. They just use. SaaO names the gap.

The framework builds on the author's prior work in agent governance: DCP-AI (Digital Citizenship Protocol for AI Agents), an open protocol under the Apache 2.0 license, started in October 2025, defining verifiable identity, intent declaration, immutable audit and agent-to-agent communication. DCP-AI was submitted in response to the NIST CAISI RFI and the NCCoE Concept Paper. There is still a way to go before frameworks like this are formally recognized, but the debate is open, and it is the right debate.

SaaO is an open framework. Its content is published under CC BY-SA 4.0: you may teach it, adapt it and build services on it with attribution. Wingsoft maintains a reference implementation and appears in the directory as one more provider, subject to the same criteria as anyone else.