Comments on: Software as a Service: The Hype Must End

By: Shaun

Shaun — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 09:52:22 +0000

Hello
Do you know of a good Software as a Service (SaaS) software? Recently I’ve heard a lot about Paragent which assures flexibility and long-term options to the hosted customers – can anyone provide more details of it ? Any informationa about this would be great.
Thanks in Advance
Shaun

By: David Nordell

David Nordell — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:44:56 +0000

I agree that one should not automatically turn every application into SaaS. In many cases there is no business justification for doing so, whether in turns of providing the software or data to the user, or in terms of RoI (for all that it’s often difficult to assess RoI even half-accurately).

The real problem, to which Sean alludes correctly, is in the implementation. SaaS needs to be implemented at a very high level of reliability, scaleability and security, and this is often not done. Part of the reason, I suspect, is that too many SaaS sites have been done as slightly flakey B2C services for a public with a short attention span: if SaaS provider A doesn’t quite hack it, the consumers can always move over to B, the more so as this is a very dynamic space. The providers, however, may not yet have properly learned that they need to provide B2B services at a much higher level. This implies more expensive infrastructures, SLA monitoring, constant proactive testing to make sure that the system doesn’t break, and all sorts of other things that need discipline. Actually, emphasis on the second S — service — which doesn’t always come naturally to technology people, who tend to be accustomed to getting the product out of the door and then getting on with the next version or next product.

By: Sean Gallagher

Sean Gallagher — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 04:19:09 +0000

Thanks for the comment, David.

No, I’m well aware that SaaS has been around in various forms for a while. I’ve actually done some successful SaaS implememtations in the past. But throwing everything at the SaaS model as it stands, as some seem to want to do, is as wrongheaded as pulling everything back inside the firewall.

And I don’t mean to suggest that the alternative is to yank it all back inside — we’re past that at this point.

What I would suggest, however, is that greater care needs to be taken in implementing SaaS than is currently. Some sort of caching, perhaps? Maybe a slightly more distributed architecture than Salesforce and others use?

By: David Nordell

David Nordell — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 17:40:49 +0000

This article is superficial and muddle-headed, and mistakes assertions for facts. SaaS has been around for much longer than the author imagines, especially in one of the most mission-critical industries going: finance. Reuters and Bloomberg, to mention just the largest information services, provide not only news but also securities and money market quotations, trading infrastructure, and more recently also specialised P2P applications, all using the SaaS infrastructure model. I can’t speak for Reuters, whose technology infrastructure is made up of too many disparate bits and therefore, according to what I’ve heard, costs a lot to maintain and upgrade, but Bloomberg certainly doesn’t fit the author’s assumptions about a failed business model. On the contrary, it’s a very successful business indeed. Both these services, and many other financial information and technology systems provisioned as SaaS, function with high availability and low latency, and the customers appear to be happy enough.
It’s true that a salt truck can knock down a communications line. But that can happen to any distributed company’s infrastructure, and often does. I’m sure I’m not the only reader here who has experienced a bank branch going off line because of communications or computer problems, to say nothing of government offices. These problems exist in non-SaaS architecture as well. In fact, I’ve seen presentations that discussed how mission-critical investment banking systems that were supposed to function at five 9′s, all in the data centre, were known to go down for more than 24 hours at a time.
The answer to the potential problems is not to bring everything back inside the firewall, but to design and build the systems with enough capacity, with proper fail-over of critical application and data servers as well as comms lines, and so on. Does this require a higher level of architectural and technological design and execution? No doubt. But that is part of the learning curve, and doesn’t in any way invalidate the SaaS model. I’m admittedly not totally objective, because my own company’s product depends completely on SaaS deployment; but that’s because of the functionality it is designed to provide.