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IT experts demystify SaaS

Alex Kayle
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 03 Jul 2009

The biggest myth in today's software-as-service (SaaS) environment is that all SaaS is built equal.

This is according to Barry Gill, product development specialist at Mimecast, who points out that many different forms of SaaS, as well as hybrid forms, have emerged, each with their own pros and cons. He believes businesses should choose the right SaaS tool for the job, not one that simply follows a trend.

Gill will demystify other misconceptions about SaaS at the upcoming ITWeb SaaS conference, taking place on 4 August at Gallagher Estate in Midrand.

Counting costs

He notes the high telecommunications costs in SA have become a growth inhibitor for the adoption of SaaS.

“As has always been the case in SA, high telecommunication costs have made is difficult for SaaS vendors to really spring up all over the show, and difficult for customers to use SaaS services located abroad.

“With communications costs slowly dropping, the market will see more vendors arriving in SA and more customers prepared to use services provided in other legal jurisdictions.

“The challenges around SaaS fall mainly around local bandwidth costs,” he says. “Legal jurisdiction and bandwidth costs for international providers and data ownership can all be addressed fairly easily if a customer honestly evaluates their options.”

Reducing complexity

ITWeb's Software as a Service (SaaS) conference

More information about ITWeb's SaaS conference, which takes place on 4 August 2009 at Gallagher Estates, Midrand, is available online here.

According to Gill, companies are turning to SaaS to cut IT costs and reduce complexity. “Having complex infrastructures to provide service to an organisation costs lots of money - whether these costs are hardware, software, staffing skills or complex migrations.

“Using a SaaS vendor takes all of the unknowns out of the cost models required to provide a service to an organisation and all costs are run as operational expenditure. This is highly attractive to companies not wanting to release capex.

“A good SaaS vendor will also be able to provide high levels of risk mitigation to a customer with the provision of this service.”

While SaaS vendors are touting green computing as a positive benefit of using SaaS, Gill says this varies from vendor to vendor.

“Shared infrastructure means fewer servers need to be deployed, meaning in turn that less power is consumed and fewer natural resources are consumed in the building of the boxes.”

Related stories:
Companies still wary of cloud
SaaS gets the spotlight

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