Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The
System integrator
is needed to put all the parts together and bundle the solu-
tion, and often it also provides consultancy services besides coordination, installa-
tion, deployment and IT support. In addition to the actors and roles defined, other
market players that form a VAS cluster (e.g. payment and consultancy providers)
are involved.
For the end user, SaaS is a seemingly simple solution, and it promises a fast and
easy access to the service without any (or at least any significant) changes in the
end user's IT structure, because almost everything is done via the automated web
marketplace, with little or no human interference. However, the pros and cons should
be always analyzed carefully before making the buying decision, and depending on
the SaaS in question (e.g. business critical or peripheral, and its economic value)
the IT managers, application users, and legal department (SLA negotiation) should
be involved.
Contact points for the end user: in a typical scenario, the solution provider is the
contact with the end user, and the most important flows (from the end-user's point
of view) are the services and payments with the solution provider.
Today at the market the interesting contact points for the end users are:
• Companies who already possess large infrastructures like Amazon, Google.
Microsoft, Dell, Yahoo, IBM, SUN and Apple are already exploring the Grid
(the Cloud) in different stadia. They have large infrastructures, have discov-
ered ways to deliver economies of scale on storage unavailable to many other
enterprises and/or they have a large position in software provisioning that needs
to be defended. Google struck the first blow in February 2007 with its $50 per
user, per year enterprise Gmail offer. Gartner estimates that Google's own cost
of goods sold for enterprise Gmail is no more than $4 per user per year —
with the biggest expenses being electricity and storage. Ultimately, the single
greatest cost for e-mail operations in the next 10 years will be level-one help-
desk support, bypassing both licensing and operational costs. Providers of utility
computing appear to be converging with providers of SaaS to target a wider
market (Cain 2008).
• Application providers who want to evolve and are evolving from SaaP to SaaS
offerings, e.g. Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel.
• New SaaS providers like Salesnet.com and Salesforce.com.
Challenges and considerations
: Despite of the apparent user-friendliness of SaaS,
end user should be aware of several issues before the decision to start to use SaaS.
Firstly, for the provider SaaS is quite complex and its provision involves often many
market players. Moreover, SaaS is a relatively new software provision model, and
the business model may not yet be fully developed. Thus, the end-user should eval-
uate carefully the provider's capacity and capabilities to provide the service in ques-
tion. In general, the provider's reliability, the system's scalability, confidentiality
and security issues are very important issues. Also the Service Level Agreements
(SLAs) should be negotiated carefully by taking into account business needs and
technical requirements. Secondly, the scope and scale the end-user decides to
externalize and the use of certain software (e.g. business-critical vs. peripheral
