Special Report
Software as a Service
For Clark, the clue is in the name: “Consider the last word in the acronym SaaS – Service. Software has traditionally been offered as a capital purchase, involving software licensing, protracted project timescales, significant hardware and implementation costs and on-going support contracts. True
“
Microsoft Plus services, and there will be certain standardised services that you can boil down to a Cloud application and that you can use at will. But there will also be software, because the intellectual property cannot be encapsulated purely within a Cloud application; it will also have to be at the
Our fingers were burned once, but we know what the mistakes were, and we do have to go back there one day because the advantages in terms of opening up markets to organisations will still be as compelling as they were in 1998/9.”
– Steve Farr, Microsoft Dynamics.
SaaS revolutionises this, in the same way that contract hire revolutionised the motor industry or temporary staff changed the way that busy companies sourced human resources. Good SaaS offerings should avoid all of these traditional pitfalls and problems.”
Steve Farr, product manager at Microsoft Dynamics
customer end. If you look at a simple ‘Cloud’ application, iTunes, it’s not really a Cloud application at all; it’s a download. It has to be a download, you have to run music tracks on your computer because you’re not always going to be connected. And you want to add as the consumer of those tracks your own information. You want to rate the tracks, you want to organise them into different playlists and so on. So you can add your own intellectual property in order to come up with the solutions to your listening needs. So if it’s true in that microcosm way for iTunes it’s very very true when you’re talking about business applications.”
Steve Farr, product manager at Microsoft Dynamics, also points to the
definition being in the name. “It’s about the service paradigm that we are told that we are moving to. That is, intellectual property for intellectual property’s sake is not worth as much as it used to be – and this is true for music right the way through to software. The overriding commercial relationship on intellectual property therefore should be around providing it as a service. Do I think this is correct? – I don’t because the whole of the intellectual property behind a ‘solution’ as opposed to a piece of software is not purely owned by the vendor of the software; it is also owned by the customer. The customer, and indeed other business partners, will configure, re-align, add coding and add a huge amount of value – value-added resellers and so forth. Customer have a huge amount of value to add to these solutions in terms of what they want to do to them and how they want to make them work for their organisations. Therefore, the whole of the IP cannot be wrapped up in a service. So what we see is much more of a mixed paradigm where there will be what Microsoft calls
www.logisticsit.com
Dave
Carmichael, senior product marketing manager at Sterling Commerce
For Dave Carmichael, senior product marketing manager at Sterling Commerce, SaaS is in essence multi-tenant, involving the shared use of one software instance, together with the capability for frequent software updates. “When we talk about on-premise software we refer to the ability to customise and the benefits that that brings; when we talk about SaaS we refer to configurations – you cannot customise our multi-tenant instance, because you're providing the software to everybody,” he said. The definition provided by Fabrice Maquignon, CEO of Transwide, also references the fact that SaaS is a single- instance, multi-tenant application that is modular, and which is available on a pay-as-you-go model.
Solid
integration platform
Maquignon adds that a key benefit of a reliable SaaS solution is the way it can connect to other information systems. “This is really a solid integration platform that allows you to be very versatile in the way you interface with your clients – this is a critical point” he remarked. Maquignon also pointed out that in the SaaS marketplace there is normally no up-front capital expenditure involved, “so from a cost-perspective this helps to advance the SaaS model’s appeal to end users”, he said. Maquignon adds that the technology and agility >>
May 2010
MANUFACTURING
&LOGISTICS
IT
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