SaaS – Software as a service

Software As A Service (SaaS)

SaaS refers to software that is accessed via a web browser and is paid on a subscription basis. Different from the traditional model where a customer buys a license to software and assumes ownership for its maintenance and installation, SaaS presents significant advantages to the customer.

SaaS is a new way of using software. There are no hardware, implementation or acquisition costs involved to run the application from the customer’s side. It’s the responsibility of the SaaS vendor (us) to manage and run the application with utmost security, performance and reliability.

Since customers pay a subscription, they have immediate access to the new features and functionality. Unlike traditional softwares where upgrades would happen once a year or once in 6 months (with the vendor coming to your office with a CD), the SaaS vendor continuously pushes new updates, fixes to the application, which is immediately accessible by the customer. This reduces the length of time it takes a customer to recognize value from the software.

That being said, all this benefit does not comes without any challenges:

Technical challenges

The traditional enterprise applications available in the marketplace are usually not architected and designed to run on the SaaS platform for the following reasons:

• They do not have a built-in functionality that is required to support the subscription based hosted service. This functionality includes billing, monitoring, support, and performance related functions.
• The data store of the application is not architected and designed to isolate data of multiple tenants [ tenants are group of clients using the service ]
• The application is not built to support customization of its user interface, business logic, and database by configuration through the browser in such a way that different tenants within the same hosted instance see different behavior of each of these three layers of the application.
• The traditional applications usually do not support security of the sensitive data, which becomes necessary if the application data resides outside the firewall.
• The applications are usually not built to scale for a large number of users. The application scalability is important to cater to the load created by users from multiple tenants of the application using the single runtime instance.

SaaS is still in its growing years and vendors are gearing towards meeting all these challenges. Not only software companies, even hosting companies are growing up and facing the challenges of huge amount of data getting transfered to and fro.

Looking from the past experience, its very clear that we will get solid solutions built and provided to clients in near future.