Posted by Simon Dadswell, Channel Marketing Manager, Endeavors Technologies.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is frequently being hyped as the next revolution in software.
For advocates, SaaS is an exciting break from tradition, allowing software vendors to reinvent their business models and create innovative pricing and service level agreements based on a subscription basis. For organizations, renting applications over the web allows them to decrease IT costs, optimize the use of internal IT resources, and simplify license management.
While SaaS has been around for a number of years with its origins dating back to the Application Service Provider (ASP) era, in its latest guise and with the arrival of large pure-play SaaS vendors the market is rapidly maturing. According to industry analysts Gartner, the global market for SaaS reached $6.3 billion in 2007 and is on track to hit $19.3 billion by end of 2011.
Whether you believe the statistics or not, it is clear to see that the stars of the SaaS market, ala salesforce.com and Netsuite, are biting at the heels of the major incumbent IT players such as Microsoft, SAP and Oracle, and forcing them to take note.
Microsoft, for example, has launched a SaaS incubation center to unite the services of ISVs, SIs and telcos in order to bring new windows-based hosting and application services to market. Rumors also suggest they are being pressured by their reseller channel to unlock the traditional licensing model and enable the latest versions of Microsoft Office to be offered on a subscription basis.
Indeed, Fasthosts the UK ISP and hosting company recently announced (controversially) Microsoft Office as an online service starting at as little as £5 plus VAT per month.
This competitive backdrop clearly raises the stakes for other software vendors to deliver applications in the way that their customers, as well as potential customers, want. There is a range of technology available to help software vendors evolve their delivery platform and take advantage of the abundant opportunities that exist.
The range of technology choices for evolving to a SaaS architecture can vary considerably including traditional client/server and hosting arrangements that provides access to a single instance of an application deployed on a server, with or without configuration options and license management controls.
Most ISVs currently take an exiting client-server application, develop a cut-down, HTML client and host it on a central server through a third party. Alternatively, they undertake a costly and resource-extensive program to re-write their applications for the web.
However, turning legacy software applications into large-scale, multi-tenant web deployments in these ways often results in performance issues and/or escalating infrastructure costs.
At Endeavors, we believe software vendors need to change their way of thinking about how to develop, market and support their core products, while protecting existing revenue streams.
Vendors must address the on-demand requirements of SaaS without compromising existing investments. They should not be constrained by classic Terminal Server and hosting environments, or be hampered by performance issues, especially as software deployment is rapidly migrating to the network.
Application streaming and virtualization offers a best-of-breed approach to SaaS deployment by enabling applications to be managed centrally and streamed on demand to a any client and deployed as if natively installed on the client.
This technology exploits local computing power and modern network capabilities and offers a positive user experience. No code changes. No large-scale bandwidth consumption. No performance or security issues. This technology is ideally suited to address the unique challenges of SaaS.
For example, Endeavors Application Jukebox SaaS Edition allows service providers to incorporate their own kiosk-type application interfaces. A leading broadband provider in the U.K. uses our technology to offer Microsoft Office through a SaaS model.
To sum up, software vendors and ISPs that want to rapidly take advantage of the growing SaaS market should consider application streaming and virtualization as the most appropriate technology platform. Unless of course, they want to remain bastions of antiquated technology.
