Pooya's place (in the Gulf) : Saas

SaaS concerns and S+S

pooyad — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:54:00 GMT

I was pointed to an article by John Dvorak on the feasibility of SaaS as a business model given concerns around privacy. It reads as a bit of an alarmist article to me since its main point seems to be that US based SaaS providers are subject to US Government warrants and possible spying could take place.

That by itself is a valid point and should raise concerns as to the type of data that companies will host with their Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. But this is not news, as a company you always you have to decide which functions (and therefore data) are mission critical, sensitive or the focus of your business. These are not good candidates for the hosted model as they should be the differentiators of your company. Once you choose a hosted (Saas) model for a particular function (eg. Payroll), you’re basically saying this function is a commodity and not something that sets my company apart (basically a cost) and should therefore not be very sensitive (with the exception of email).

Now it’s very true that the EU and Canada have much stricter privacy laws than the US, but this should lead to the conclusion that SaaS companies should be set up outside the US to allay these fears and this is what I'm looking to promote locally. There is also a lot of discussion on how US laws affect both US companies that deal with international clients and US companies that host their physical servers outside the US; but in summary, no one is really sure

The bigger issue, rather than the hypothetical scenario of the US government spying on you, is the breach of security that we see happening all the time. Hosted data that is made available over the net (as the business model of SaaS) is much more open to attack than internal data. What SaaS providers are saying is that they’ll make it secure, because they’re the experts. This is what every enterprise has to think about.

In the article it mentioned both Google and Microsoft as being susceptible to these concerns, I think this is certainly true for pure SaaS providers but it only reinforces Microsoft's S+S strategy. As we always say, some things should be kept on-site (Software) and some hosted (Services); so if you’re concerned about privacy or spying, keep those things in house on Software and only use Services (SaaS) for the commodity things that are purely a cost center or to augment your software. This should be a lot more of a concern for companies that follow only the SaaS model, everything in the cloud, companies such as Salesforce.com and Google and many others.

Will Software as a Service (SaaS) lead to a wider range of programming languages being used?

pooyad — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:29:00 GMT

I've been reading a lot and giving talks on SaaS and S+S (Software + Services) but the thing most people don't mention is that if you're building a true SaaS application then the only things your customer will ever see is the web interface the API (webservices, REST, ...) which are most likely XML based at this point. You'll be running the data center where the application lives and won't have to ever worry about deployment at a customer site. Now there's lots of IT operations benefits to this but as a developer this means you can really write your program in whatever language you want as long it can create the web interface and the XML webservices. Now this is true even in true SOA models but with SaaS you're pretty much guaranteed that you control the service at all times and are separated by the internet from your customers (rather than partners or other departments in an enterprise).

I'll quote Paul Graham here:

"... when you're writing software that only has to run on your own servers, you can use any language you want. When you're writing desktop software, there's a strong bias toward writing applications in the same language as the operating system. ... But with Web-based software ... you can use whatever language you want."

This is even more true in the SaaS world. So, will we see an increase the range of languages used (beyond C#, Java,VB)? Will the web centric languages (PHP, Pyhton, Perl, ...) be used more for "enterprise" SaaS applications? Will Lisp make a huge comeback ;)

SaaS - how to use a Software Delivery Platform

pooyad — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 12:54:00 GMT

It's been a long summer hiatus, hopefully everyone enjoyed their summer as much as I did; finally back and ready to start posting on a regular basis.

There have been a lot of discussions around Software as a Service and I've been doing a lot of presentations on "Software + Services" (I'll explain what I mean by that in a later blog post), but one SaaS area that hasn't been talked about much is how to enable more efficient software development through the conecpt of a Service Delivery Platform in a Saas hoster. Gianpaolo and Fred discuss this in the latest issue of the Architecture Journal.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/arcjournal/bb735303.aspx

In case you haven't signed up for the Architecture Journal yet, it's free and you'll be very pleased with the content.

Microsoft Architect Forum: SaaS session

pooyad — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 09:21:00 GMT

A great overview of Software as a Service (SaaS) from Kevin Sangwell.