Enterprises,
the customer-driven ones, are moving beyond cost reduction. In their pursuit of
redefining their businesses along customer-centric dimensions, they are
adopting technologies that help them deliver greater time-to-market, accuracy,
and scalability advantages. SaaS and cloud computing is enabling them to do
that and that acts a catalyst of competitive strength for the companies who
adopt them. Furthermore, vendors/providers, in trying to retain market share in
this highly competitive environment, are not raising prices.
· As per Gartner Inc. reports - global IT
spending shrank 5.5% to $3.5 trillion but CIOs and business houses continued to
embrace software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.
· Software-as-a-Service market is projected to be
around $32.8B in 2016 if it continues to grow at a steady CAGR of 19.5%.
· If this growth continues for another 3 years as
the predictions indicate, by 2018, 27.8% of the worldwide enterprise software
market will be delivered on the SaaS platform, generating $50.8B in revenue.
Consequently, we are sure
to witness, through 2016 and by the end of 2015
that over half of all CRM deployment will be cloud-based SaaS. Similarly,
there will be rise in the demand for other on-demand SaaS-based business
applications systems such as Human Resource Management, Business
Intelligence (BI), Analytics and Data Mining, E-commerce, Database systems, ERP
systems, corporate portals etc. SaaS is a
service consumed over the Internet and so it works very differently from an
on-premise model. So all/any organization(s) planning a transition to this
service should make careful technical and design decisions for a successful
migration to SaaS.
1.
Data Access
Business should have a copy of their data or direct access to database
and tables within.
2.
Data Security
Data in transit should be encrypted, preferably with an encryption known
only to the business to which data belongs.
3.
Data Storage
It is recommended that vendor uses NoSQL databases that scale
automatically and have in-built features like data backup, resilience, Disaster
Recovery etc.
4.
Scalability
It’s an important element to focus on. So session information should be
shared or encoded in the URLs and databases used should be scalable too, for
e.g. MongoDB and Cassandra.
5.
Licensing
You can share licenses or explore open source software (OSS) options for
software infrastructure, frameworks, components, or tools.
6.
User-experience
For good user-experience, SaaS application should be simple to
administer, have self-service sign up process, managed user profiles, easy
subscription and billing procedures.
Make an
informed decision as you embark on your SaaS journey.
