SaaS

clouds guarantee most of the non-functionrequirements (Quality of Service (QoS) attributes) such as availability,

highperformance, on-demand scalability/elasticity, affordability, global-

scale accessibilityand usability, energy efficiency etc

• clouds guarantee most of the non-function requirements (Quality of Service (QoS) attributes) such as availability, high performance, on-demand scalability/elasticity, affordability, global-scale accessibility and usability, energy efficiency etc

• In SaaS, an application is hosted by a service provider and then accessed via the World Wide Web by a client

• SaaS (Software as a Service) is an application hosted on a remote server and accessed through the Internet.

SaaS can be divided into two major categories:• Line of business services -These are business solutions offered

to companies and enterprises. They are sold via a subscription service. Applications covered under this category include business processes, like supply-chain management applications, customer relations applications, and similar business-oriented tools.

• Customer-oriented services These services are offered to the general public on a subscription basis. More often than not, however, they are offered for free and supported by advertising. Examples in this category include the web mail services, online gaming, and consumer banking, among others.

AdvantagesThere are definite advantages to your organization pursuing

SaaS, for example:• There’s a faster time to value and improved productivity, when

compared to the long implementation cycles and failure rate of enterprise software.

• There are lower software licensing costs. • SaaS offerings feature the biggest cost savings over installed

software by eliminating the need for enterprises to install and maintain hardware, pay labor costs, and maintain the applications.

• SaaS can be used to avoid the custom development cycles to get applications to the organization quickly.

• SaaS vendors typically have very meticulous security audits.

• Many SaaS vendors have the capabilities to let customers comply with Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) regulations.

• SaaS vendors allow companies to have the most current version of an application as possible. This allows the organization to spend their development dollars on new innovation in their industry, rather than supporting old versions of applications

• Using the existing software paradigm, the user purchases a software package and license by paying a one-time fee. The software then becomes the property of the user who bought it.

• Support and updates are provided by the vendor under the terms of the license agreement.

• This can be costly if you are installing a new application on hundreds or thousands of computers.

• SaaS, on the other hand, has no licensing. Rather than buying the application, you pay for it through the use of a subscription, and you only pay for what you use. If you stop using the application, you stop paying

Vendor Advantages

• The advantages flow both ways. Not only does the end user benefit, but so does the vendor.

• And financial benefit is the top one—vendors get a constant stream of income, often what is more than the traditional software licensing setup. Additionally, through SaaS, vendors can fend off piracy concerns and unlicensed use of software.

• Vendors also benefit more as more subscribers come online. They have a huge investment in physical space, hardware, technology staff, and process development.

• The more these resources are used to capacity, the more the provider can clear as margin.

Google’s SaaS offerings include Google Apps and Google Apps Premier Edition.

The Premier Edition includes hosted services for communication and collaboration designed for businesses of all sizes. Google Apps Premier Edition is available for US$50 per user account per year, and includes phone support, additional storage, and a new set of administration

and business integration capabilities.Google Apps, launched as a free service in August 2006, is a suite of

applications that includes Gmail webmail services, Google Calendar shared calendaring, Google Talk instant messaging and Voice over IP, and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page on a specific domain.

More than 100,000 small businesses and hundreds of universitiesuse the service. Google Apps Premier Edition now joins Google Apps

Standard Edition and Google Apps Education Edition.

Google

Google Apps Premier Edition has the following unique features:

• Per-user storage of 10GBs Offers about 100 times the storage of the average corporate mailbox.

• APIs for business integration APIs for data migration, user provisioning, single sign-on, and mail gateways enable businesses to further customize the service for unique environments.

•

Uptime of 99.9 percent Service level agreements for high availability of Gmail, with Google monitoring and crediting customers if service levels are not met.

• Advertising optional Advertising is turned off by default, but businesses can choose to include Google’s relevant target-based ads if desired.

• Low fee Simple annual fee of $50 per user account per year makes it practical to

offer these applications to select users in the organization.

Salesforce for Google Apps

Salesforce for Google Apps is a combination of essential applications for business productivity (email, calendaring, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, instant messaging) and CRM (sales, marketing, service and support, partners) that enables an entirely new way for business professionals to communicate, collaborate, and work together in real time over the Web.

Salesforce for Google Apps offers a complete way for businesses to harness the power of cloud computing without the cost and complexity of managing hardware or software infrastructure.

The following features are included in Salesforce for Google Apps:

• Salesforce and Gmail Businesses can now easily send, receive, and store email communication, keeping a complete record of customer interactions for better sales execution and improved customer satisfaction.

• Salesforce and Google Docs Create, manage, and share online Google Documents, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Presentations within your sales organization, marketing group, or support team for instant collaboration.

• Salesforce and Google Talk Instantly communicate with colleagues or customers from Salesforce and optionally attach Google Talk conversations to customer or prospect records stored in Salesforce.

• Salesforce and Google Calendar Expose sales tasks and marketing campaigns from Salesforce on Google Calendar.

Software plus ServicesMicrosoft’s take on SaaS is slightly different with their Software plus Services (sometimesthey shorten it to S+S). In this model, typical SaaS is bolstered with software running locally.That is, you run some software on-site and reach out to the cloud for additional services.This provides the flexibility of using a cloud provider, and also the reliability of having datastored on-site, as well.

Microsoft offers SaaS in a number of forms. One that is particularly appealing to small

businesses is Microsoft Office Live Small Business. http://www.smallbusiness.officelive.comMicrosoft Office Live Small Business offers features

including Store Manager, an e-commerce tool to help small businesses easily sell products on their own web site and on eBay; and E-mail Marketing beta, to make sending email newsletters and promotions simple and affordable.

IBMIBM—offers its own SaaS solution under the name “Blue Cloud.” Blue Cloud is a series of cloud computing offerings that will allow

corporate datacenters to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.

Blue Cloud is based on open-standards and open-source software supported by IBM software, systems technology, and services.

IBM’s Blue Cloud development is supported by more than 200 IBM Internet-scale researchers worldwide and targets clients who want to explore the extreme scale of cloud computing infrastructures.

IBM is collaborating on cloud computing initiatives with select corporations, universities, Internet-based enterprises, and government agencies

Tips for Evaluating SaaS

• Time to value• Trial Period• Low entry costs• Service

Company Offerings

• QuickBooks Overview• QuickBooks Online (www.qboe.com) gives small

business owners the ability to access their financial data whether they are at work, home, or on the road.

• iPhone and BlackBerry CapabilitiesAdditionally, Intuit offers both iPhone and BlackBerry

integration with QuickBooksOnline, the leading web-based small business

accounting software.

THE CHALLENGES OF SaaS PARADIGMAs with any new technology, SaaS and cloud concepts too suffer

a number of issues. The overall views are listed out below. Loss or lack of the following features deters the massive

adoption of clouds1. Controllability2. Visibility & flexibility3. Security and Privacy4. High Performance and Availability5. Integration and Composition6. Standards

Integration Conundrum

. While SaaS applications offer outstanding value in terms of features and functionalities relative to cost, they have introduced several challenges specific to integration.

The first issue is that the majority of SaaS applications are point solutions and service one line of business.

As a result, companies without a method of synchronizing data between multiple lines of businesses are at a serious disadvantage in terms of maintaining

accurate data, forecasting, and automating key business processes.

APIs are Insufficient.Many SaaS providers have responded to the integration

challenge by developing application programming interfaces (APIs).

Unfortunately, accessing and managing data via an API requires a significant amount of coding as well as maintenance due to frequent API modifications and updates.

Furthermore, despite the advent of web services, there is little to no standardization or consensus on the structure or format of SaaS APIs.

As a result, the IT department expends an excess amount of time and resources developing and maintaining a unique method of communication for the API of

each SaaS application deployed within the organization.

SaaS INTEGRATION PRODUCTS AND PLATFORMS

• Composition and collaboration will become critical and crucial

• Force.com is a Platform as a Service (PaaS), enabling developers to create and deliver any kind of on-demand business application.

• However, in order to take advantage of this breakthrough cloud technology, there is a need for a flexible and robust integration solution to synchronize force.com with any ondemand or on-premise enterprise applications, databases, and legacy systems

Jitterbit

• Until now, integrating force.com applications with other on-demand applications and systems within an enterprise has seemed like a daunting and tough task that required too much time, money, and expertise.

• Jitterbit is a fully graphical integration solution that provides users a versatile platform and a suite of productivity tools to reduce the integration efforts sharply

• Apart from a scalable and secure server, Jitterbit provides a powerful graphical environment to help us quickly design, implement, test, deploy, and manage the integration projects

• Jitterbit is comprised of two major components:

• Jitterbit Integration Environment point-and-click graphical UI that enables to quickly configure, test, deploy and manage integration projects on the Jitterbit server.

• Jitterbit Integration Server A powerful and scalable run-time engine that processes all the integration operations, fully configurable and manageable from the Jitterbit application.

• Jitterbit is making integration easier, faster, and more affordable than ever before.

Boomi Software (Dell)

• Boomi AtomSphere is an integration service that is completely on-demand and connects any combination of SaaS, PaaS, cloud, and on-premise applications without the burden of installing and maintaining software packages or appliances

• Boomi offers the “pure SaaS” integration solution that enables to quickly develop and deploy connections between applications, regardless of the delivery model.

• (Oracle E-business suite,Peoplesoft,siebel)

Bungee Connect(eclipse based)

• For professional developers, Bungee Connect enables cloud computing by offering an application development and deployment platform that enables highly interactive applications integrating multiple data sources and facilitating instant deployment.

• Bungee Connect reduces the efforts to integrate (mashup) multiple web services into a single application.

Online MQ• Online MQ is an Internet-based queuing

system. • It is a complete and secure online messaging

solution for sending and receiving messages over any network.

• It is a cloud messaging queuing service. • Here are some of the advantages for using

Online MQ.

• Ease of Use• No Maintenance. No need to install any queuing

software/server and no need to be concerned with MQ server uptime, upgrades and maintenance.

• Load Balancing and High Availability. Load balancing can be achieved on a busy system by arranging for more than one program instance to service a queue.

• Easy Integration

Linxter

• Linxter is a cloud messaging framework for connecting all kinds of applications, devices, and systems.

• Linxter is a message oriented and cloud-based middleware technology and smoothly automates the complex tasks that developers face when creating communication-based products and services

• With everything becoming Internet-enabled Linxter’s solution securely, easily, and

dynamically connects all these things. Anything that is connected to the Internet can connect to each other through the Linxter’s

dynamic communication channels

BUSINESSES-TO-BUSINESS INTEGRATION (B2Bi) SERVICES

• B2Bi has been a mainstream activity for connecting geographically distributed businesses for purposeful and beneficial cooperation.

• B2Bi systems are good candidate for IaaS as they are traditionally employed to automate business processes between manufacturers and their external trading partners such as retail, warehouse, transport, and inventory systems.

• .NET Service Bus. The .NET Service provides a hosted, secure, and broadly accessible infrastructure for pervasive communication large-scale event distribution, naming, and service publishing.

• Services can be exposed through the Service Bus Relay, providing connectivity options for service endpoints that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to reach.

• Endpoints can be located behind network address translation (NAT) boundaries or bound to frequently changing, dynamically assigned IP addresses, or both.