One of the major reason SaaS became successful was that it eliminated the overhead of Application management (customization, maintenance, upgrade) from the users of software.
Serviced/Managed Appliance is an alternate strategy to provide a similar benefit with higher control to the users . Here is a definition of an appliance
"An appliance is a black box, which contains the H/W (optional), Software, Applications bundled, pre-configured and remotely managed by the provider. The pricing can be similar to the SaaS pricing say subscription or usage based."
Appliance resolves some of the SaaS adoption inhibitors like Concern on data security, Integration concerns, network bandwidth concerns as the software and data sits inside the corporate firewall. The data that gets transferred to the provider is basically the events which help providers in proactively supporting the appliance and also any software upgrades that gets installed in the appliance remotely by the provider.
Appliances offer an alternate delivery mechanism for ISV's whose product do not support a SaaS based delivery model (handles highly sensitive data or has a huge data transfer requirements) and help them to address the long-tail. For existing SaaS vendors, appliance is a complimentary offering, which will help them to sell their software to markets which are more sensitive to data and have complex integration requirements.
Most ISVs or providers would not want to build a Hardware appliance as it would require a huge distribution channel to reach out to the customers. Also, Hardware appliance limits the ability for provides to offer attractive subscription based pricing as they incur a huge upfront cost for the hardware piece. The way forward would be to build a software appliance - which is a bundle of OS (optional if it supports on-demand platforms like EC2), DB, App server, software, remote App Management infrastructure. Open source software have a huge role to play in building these software appliances.
Serviced/Managed Appliance is an alternate strategy to provide a similar benefit with higher control to the users . Here is a definition of an appliance
"An appliance is a black box, which contains the H/W (optional), Software, Applications bundled, pre-configured and remotely managed by the provider. The pricing can be similar to the SaaS pricing say subscription or usage based."
Appliance resolves some of the SaaS adoption inhibitors like Concern on data security, Integration concerns, network bandwidth concerns as the software and data sits inside the corporate firewall. The data that gets transferred to the provider is basically the events which help providers in proactively supporting the appliance and also any software upgrades that gets installed in the appliance remotely by the provider.
Appliances offer an alternate delivery mechanism for ISV's whose product do not support a SaaS based delivery model (handles highly sensitive data or has a huge data transfer requirements) and help them to address the long-tail. For existing SaaS vendors, appliance is a complimentary offering, which will help them to sell their software to markets which are more sensitive to data and have complex integration requirements.
Most ISVs or providers would not want to build a Hardware appliance as it would require a huge distribution channel to reach out to the customers. Also, Hardware appliance limits the ability for provides to offer attractive subscription based pricing as they incur a huge upfront cost for the hardware piece. The way forward would be to build a software appliance - which is a bundle of OS (optional if it supports on-demand platforms like EC2), DB, App server, software, remote App Management infrastructure. Open source software have a huge role to play in building these software appliances.
