SaaS and SOA

A lot of information is available on the relevance of SaaS and SOA. Wikipedia quotes SOA as "In computing, the term service-oriented architecture (SOA [pronounced "sō-uh" or "es-ō-ā"]) expresses a perspective of software architecture that defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of the business processes and software users."

The services in SOA are not tied with a single consumer application and is built for a generic usage. This introduces a lot of complexity to the service, the consumption of these services can be in the most un-intended way and the scale of usage is almost un-predictable during the development time. Traditionally enterprise software has been built for a benchmarked number of users and their scale out attributes at a service level are never taken care seriously. When these Service-oriented applications are put in a SOA infrastructure there could be serious performance problem for most of the services and also the infrastructure where these services are deployed could either be over-sized or under-sized.

Consider Saas, the applications are designed for un-predictable load and service orientation is the heart of their architecture. The core SLA for the services on the web is performance and availability. SaaS applications are built from the ground-up to ensure these SLA's. In SaaS, the customers are not going to be concerned about Scalability of the application, as it is primarily the concern of the service provider. This better aligns with the need of an SOA enabled enterprise, where the scale of usage is unpredictable and volatile.

Once enterprises starts adopting SOA extensively, they might find that the services offered in the cloud aligning better with their objectives than the on-premise services.

Office 2.0 - Are we on the right track

Today a lot of Web office products are proliferating the market. The benefits they claim are
1. Free Software
2. Easy collaboration
3. Easy access to content as they are always online
4. Easy to publish and so on...

The core question i have is why should the authoring environment be on-demand. Today we have MS-Office which has been under innovation path for more than a decade now and is highly matured and also few other open source alternatives are available. Features like Collaboration, Online publishing and document storage should be provided as service and the authoring system should still be in the desktop (Like Windows Live Writer). Look at the computing power and storage we have right now in the desktop, i think there should be some tools that run on the desktop to justify this and the first choice would be Office. Even mobile devices today have huge storage and processing power.

Now if the problem is price of the software, look for an alternate pricing for desktop office suites, build subscription based pricing (Norton antivirus has this model today, for its desktop anti-virus). The other option is to consider open source office products that run on desktop. I think open source in this space is very matured today to be put for commercial use.

The only place where weboffice tools in its current form (hosted authoring environment) might find a fit is when office capabilities (say XL) are required to be integrated in hosted enterprise applications. This requirement could be solved by a re-usable Ajax component, which could be embedded with in these hosted enterprise applications.

Office is a productivity tool requiring sophisticated features to transform data, integrate various document types, write VBA scripts and so on. Let's not deprive the users the power of office by taking everything to the web.

Please let me know what you feel.

Benefiting from Customer Association

One of the core benefits for SaaS vendors is the long term association they have with the customer. The value provided by SaaS vendors are same throughout this association, where as in traditional on-premise software the value once software is delivered and implemented gets reduced to mere support.

Now through the continuous association that's possible now, SaaS players should continuously identify ways of delivering enhanced value to their customers. For example consider an offshore services company today - they start their association with their customers say through testing or maintenance of some application, then slowly extend to other parts of customer's IT landscape and try to get as much of applications outsourced and ultimately the value delivered increases over the period of association.

SaaS also is considered to be a form of outsourcing and the vendors have opportunity to serve the customer with more value as they go along.

Consider a HRMS application provider, he can always sell outsourced BPO services related to HR to his existing customers. This not only provides additional revenue opportunity for the service provider, but also enhances relationship with the customer by impacting him across multiple touch-points and could be a positive way to retain your customers.

Open Source applications

People have been writing a lot about the open source of late and there has been a wide spread adoption of some of the opensource tools and operating systems world wide.

The way people consume these open source software suggests that they adopt open source only because the software comes for free. No one actually edits the code and tinkers with it. Now, such software only eliminates the upfront license cost and do not reduce the TCO, there has been many reports available which proves that open source is not completely free. There are still maintenance cost and infrastructure cost that are incurred in open source.

To me, open source will be successful in the platform, tools layer, but not in applications. Even though there are few successes, they are highly fragmented and still not as powerful as a Linux or a JBoss or an Apache wave. SaaS based applications are much more beneficial in reducing the TCO and also removing the headache of managing the applications. We need to wait and watch for companies like SugarCRM, which is an opensource and an on-demand vendor.