The SaaS Report

SaaS is the modern day grid. Decades ago businesses, small and large, started discarding their electric generators and plugged into the electric grid. Businesses that were rich enough or had higher requirements (SLAs) relied on captive on-premise or near-premise generation. This pattern repeats for other infrastructure that today is part of various grids- the railway network, the roads, etc. In similar vein, the computing is going through a generational shift from on-premise services to services grid or SaaS.

In this blog, we will discuss why is SaaS important? How is it changing our daily lives and impacting the decisions of CIOs? What can you as a developer for an ISV, a consultant for an SI or an end-user take advantage of this shift?

As with all generational shifts, this is not going to happen overnight. Every now and then you will notice glimpses of how the world around you is changing- your E-mail moves to Gmail from your local POP server, your CRM moves to a hosted model, your day to day work starts involving logging into sites- and one day a majority of your computing needs are served by SaaS.

Oracle is intimately involved in this transition from several vantage points. Oracle Siebel CRM On-Demand is one of the leaders in CRM SaaS, Oracle On-Demand provides hosting services for technology and applications, and leading ISVs run their SaaS applications on Oracle Database and Middleware.

I hope to have an active engagement with our readers on these topics. Feel free to leave your comments and email me.

Do you think the move to SaaS is real? Are you asking your ISVs about SaaS option? What do you think?

I will be attending the SaaS Summit 2007 on March 15,16 and the SaaSCon in April. If any of you would like to meet up and talk, shoot me an email at (anshu dot sharma at oracle . c o m).

Tags: ISV, SaaS

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If you are a customer that is using on-demand CRM, HR, Reporting, you may think that you probably need not bother about SOA. After all, SaaS is akin to ordering a meal at a restaurant rather than cooking one yourself.

But actually you should care about how the meal is prepared, metaphorically speaking, for several reasons esepecially when evaluating a new restaurant (SaaS vendor):

• Reliability: Will their service be as good tomorrow as it is today? Any time you make a long-term commitment to a service, you need to be able to predict that the vendor will be around a year (or decade) from now and the quality will not deteriorate. In real life, we do this by relying on brands and reputation, and so is true in software. However, when dealing with a new restaurant, you may need to peek inside the kitchen.
• Quality of Service: Will my food be free from E-Coli? Will my data be secure? How do I ensure compliane with HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley etc? You need to know that the burger meat was cooked to a certain temperature. In SaaS, you need to know that the software is hosted at a world-class data center, that the service provider is using a technology stack that provides security at all tiers (data, process and user interaction).
• Manageability: Will my waiter understand what I need and help me pick the wine I want or should want! As you adopt SaaS, you will want a solution that not only provides the functionality  be it CRM, HR or whatever but you also want to make sure that the users and IT will be able to manage their accounts, integrate with existing systems and processes, monitor usage, etc.