SaaS boosts productivity, innovation

Cloud computing has fundamentally changed the way infrastructure and software are delivered. It enables both of these to be delivered over the Internet, as a service. The cloud market has been typically broken into three areas, IaaS, SaaS and PaaS.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is essentially on-demand compute and storage; with software as a service (SaaS,) vendors host applications in the cloud; and platform as a service (PaaS) is a cloud-based application development platform.

However, Richard Vester, director of Cloud Services at EOH, says today, this is no longer the reality according to Forrester's top cloud analysts. "They say that there are no longer the three 'flavours' of cloud, SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. Today's vendors are looking to give enterprises what they want and broaden their appeal to developers by building cloud platforms that allow their customers more control, be it the ability for customers to build apps on their software, or have more control over their cloud infrastructure."

He says research also reveals that although IaaS and PaaS might have more of a 'shelf-life' than SaaS, SaaS only boasts a relatively small proportion of the total market.

"Similarly, although spend on PaaS and IaaS is growing fairly fast, it is predicted to still only equate to under 10% of the total infrastructure services market in the next three years. This is to be expected, because cloud's value does not lie in replicating the organisation's existing infrastructure, but in altering the way in which business is done, so if you can leapfrog to SaaS then you have a huge advantage."

It is Vester's view that current thinking about the cloud journey is changing. "A couple of years ago, the idea was virtualise, consolidate, migrate to IaaS, migrate to PaaS, and finally migrate to SaaS. However, today's smart businesses are heading straight for SaaS, and therefore avoiding the cost of the various stages of migration and letting their infrastructure fall silent."

In general, he says today's corporates are quickly adopting SaaS and have to restructure themselves to manage the flood of software they are consuming, as well as make unwanted infrastructure redundant. "Plenty of today's larger enterprises are still struggling with legacy business intelligence systems that were once nothing more than a server under someone's desk. Updating these so they can be brought up to speed and integrated with cloud is a highly complex and onerous task. They operate under different rules that are outdated and are an obstacle to future development."

However, the multi-tenancy model of SaaS enables businesses to scale rapidly without incurring more infrastructure or staffing costs. "Service providers can quickly and easily support customers and respond to changing market requirements, far faster than with on-premises software."

Moreover, he says SaaS solutions can be provisioned extremely quickly, often simply with a browser and an Internet connection, from a wide range of desktop and mobile devices.

"Going the SaaS route is a far easier option. It doesn't have to disrupt the business in any way, and there is no need to battle with legacy systems. SaaS integrates seamlessly with the business's current technology solutions, and more often than not, comes with tools to do just this."