Software as a Service (SaaS): An Enterprise Perspective

 

Another article by Microsoft on SaaS:

... Software as a Service (SaaS) has the potential to transform the way information-technology (IT) departments relate to and even think about their role as providers of computing services to the rest of the enterprise. The emergence of SaaS as an effective software-delivery mechanism creates an opportunity for IT departments to change their focus from deploying and supporting applications to managing the services that those applications provide. A successful service-centric IT, in turn, directly produces more value for the business by providing services that draw from both internal and external sources and align closely with business goals.

This is the third article in our series about SaaS. The first two articles, which can be found by clicking here, focused on the details of developing SaaS applications and providing them to customers. This time, we'd like to turn the question around and look at SaaS from the perspective of the enterprise consumer: How can IT departments benefit from adding SaaS applications to their portfolio of services? What are the implications of adding externally hosted applications to an enterprise-computing environment? What will one have to do to get ready for SaaS? This article will address all these points and examine a few special cases in which it might make sense for your department to become a SaaS provider, as well as a consumer. ...

Source: Microsoft.com

Architecture Strategies for Catching the Long Tail

On MSDN Microsoft published a few articles / whitepapers on Saas. This is the 1st in a series of 3:

... Software as a service. The words are on everyone's lips. The pages of software industry publications are full of articles about software as a service (SaaS)—articles that use words like "revolution" and "horizon" (as in, "on the…"). Everyone knows (or thinks they know) what it is, roughly, and everyone knows it's going to be big. Yet few people would say they can really define it, and even fewer know how to build it.

So, if SaaS holds such promise for the future of application delivery, why isn't there more guidance available to help people actually achieve it?

We believe that SaaS is going to have a major impact on the software industry, because software as a service will change the way people build, sell, buy, and use software. For this to happen, though, software vendors need resources and information about developing SaaS applications effectively.

This is the first in a series of papers from Microsoft dedicated to demystifying SaaS and providing practical, real-world guidance for architecting SaaS applications. This paper serves as an overview of SaaS, its challenges, and its benefits for those who are interested in offering SaaS. Future papers will explore many of these topics in detail.

This paper begins by asking just what software as a service is, exactly, and it explains the conceptual shifts that prospective SaaS vendors must experience in order to understand how it differs from traditional, on-premise software. Next, we'll look at the SaaS business model, to see how software as a service can be monetized in the real world.

Because this is an architectural paper, the largest section addresses the architecture of a SaaS application. We present a four-level maturity model that explains and puts into perspective some key attributes of SaaS: configurability, multi-tenant efficiency, and scalability. We'll examine the components of a high level SaaS architecture, and then take a closer look at a typical challenge the SaaS architect faces—that of providing a mechanism for extending the data model of a multi-tenant application.

Lastly, we'll take a brief look at some of the operational issues involved in supporting a SaaS application after deployment ...

Source: Microsoft.com