With that in mind, I just thought I would share a little about SaaS and some elementary forms of it out there which we may or may-not use today.

What is SaaS?

The simple bit – Software as a Service is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand.

The bit more in-depth bit – SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or download the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. The on-demand function may be handled internally to share licenses within a firm or by a third-party application service provider (ASP) sharing licenses between firms.

Basically - You don’t own the software or application, you don’t maintain it, service it, patch it, back it up, and you don’t tend to install it or use it locally to your network or machine – you just rent the rights to use it, usually via a web-browser or a small client installed on your machine – easy!

The positives of SaaS:

Cost - no huge up-front server and application infrastructure costs, instead a low monthly subscription.
Time - deployment is a lot quicker when you don’t have to build and test a system.
Maintenance – the SaaS provider does this for you!
Support - again, the SaaS provider does this for you!
Backup & Restore – usually, again, the SaaS provider does this for you!
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity – included - SaaS providers host these applications in multiple secure data-centres all over the world – so you can be assured of near 100% uptime and as long as you have internet, you can access your data or application.

…and much, much more such as centralisation, typically more software and application features, lower cost of ownership…

The drawbacks of SaaS:

Internet - Since SaaS utilises the internet, you must ensure that yours is robust and stable, and consider multiple SLA-bound internet circuits (such as Leased Lines or Ethernet Circuits with some auto-failover (ISDN / ADSL / 3G as an example).

Have I been using SaaS without realising?

Probably certainly yes! If you work in an office, your email may be provided to you (for example hosted Exchange), perhaps your financial and ERP system (SAP), or even your CRM system could be on-line (such as Salesforce.com).

On a domestic & home-user level, if you use GoogleDocs – a popular system for storing your files “in the cloud” – this file store system could be classed as SaaS, and I’m sure it won’t be too long until a few of us will adopt the Microsoft Online packages instead of downloading software to our home machines.

SaaS is a great way for products, services and applications to follow YOU, the user, rather than the traditional method of being dedicated to devices which may never be fully utilised. The idea is to give you trouble-free, zero maintenance access wherever you are, and I’m sure it won’t be long (5-10 years) until we all end up paying for our IT service on a cost-per-use basis, both work and home, just like we buy our electric and gas.

Darren

Although its an emerging market – virtulisation is by no-way inferior – in fact its absolutely fantastic and really does yield both great technological and business benefits – there just aren’t many boundary’s to overcome any more – apart from the initial upfront investment of some powerful server(s) and storage – but the ROI is pretty quick!

I’ve recently been working on a couple of projects using VMware ESX 3.5 – perfect for growing companies who are looking to replace multiple servers as we can easily consolidate these into one (or two with failover – VMotion).

Recently we’ve seen the introduction of vSphere 4, VMware’s latests release of Virtual Infrastructure which as VMware say is:-

“the industry’s first cloud operating system, transforming IT infrastructures into a private cloud—a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds—delivering IT infrastructure as an easily accessible service. Enable the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services with the efficiency and low cost of cloud computing—featuring uncompromising control over service levels” – VMware

All current v3.5 users with a valid VMware support contact can upgrade for free (your keys will be sent to you), We’re just looking at when backup support from Veeam (apparently already supports v4?), VizionCore and Backup Exec will be available for V4 before commercially releasing to customer sites ourselves.

More information about how vSphere can help you, visit VMware’s vSphere Website