SaaS distilled

For some time, I’ve been trying to figure out the requirements for an efficient software-as-as-service infrastructure. Here is what I came up with. I don’t feel that this taxonomy is quite final yet, so I encourage everyone to share your thoughts.

1. Automation. All user-initiated or user-requested operations, such as provisioning new user accounts and new services, allocating new resources, and upgrading to the next level of service needs to be performed very quickly and in a fully automated fashion.

2. Provisioning. Fast automated provisioning is particularly important. Service providers need to be able to provision a new application into the hosting infrastructure and start offering it to customers very quickly. Provisioning of a new customer account or a new service instance for a specific customer should be done even faster.

3. Self-service. Users want to be in control. Hence, users need an interface (API and control panel) for managing service properties within their domain of expertise and system properties that are safe to change within the SLA.

4. Licensing. Since services and applications have specific terms and conditions, providers need to be able to manage application permissions for specific users. In other words, providers need to be able to license service and applications to their users.

5. Billing. Along with separation of responsibilities comes separation of costs. Providers, users and developers act as independent entities and need to know who uses which services, how many resources and for how long. Providers need to be able to charge for service and resource usage as well as for services packages, promotions, volume discounts and so on. All of this requires a comprehensive billing system.

6. Density. One of the most important efficiency factors is the ability to host as many users on a single server as possible. A true multi-tenant design is still more art than engineering, and most applications, middleware and business frameworks (with the exception of data base servers) either don’t support multiple application instances on a single server, or require complex configuration.

7. Isolation. However densely the service instances are packed on a server, they need to be very well isolated from each other on system namespaces, faults, performance, security, etc. Service providers need to be able to fulfill and change SLA for a service without affecting other services. For example, you want to make sure that a buggy application cannot consume too much system resources and starve other applications. At the same time, customers want to make sure that their application performance will not go below certain threshold even if all other applications on the same server are also under high load.

8. Service Levels. The key to efficient SaaS infrastructure is to allow a service or an application to run at any desired level of service – from the most affordable to the highest mission-critical – without tweaking either application or the infrastructure. SaaS hosting infrastructure needs to be able to provide operational capabilities – high availability, zero downtime maintenance, distributed load-balancing, precise resource accounting and management, fault tolerance – to any application.

9. Integration. Once a user has multiple services and applications, it is critical to have some consistency among them. In particular, SSO (Single Sign-On) and UI integration (language locale, color scheme) are important to create a seamless user experience.

10. Migration. Users want the flexibility to change hosting facilities, service plans, and hosting providers with little effort. Such migration requires an ability to take services of a user/tenant and move them to a different environment or infrastructure.

Let me know which requirements of SaaS look more important to you and how you are addressing them right now.

In my next post, I’ll talk about standards and virtualization and why I think they are two most important SaaS enablers.

Looking forward to your comments!

SaaS in the Dentist Office

I hate going to the dentist … but every 6 months I get a computer generated reminder that I have an appointment or need to schedule one. Recently, I didn’t receive my reminder so I ended up forgetting to schedule my normal 6-month check up.

Nine months later, when I arrived at the dentist office, I asked the office manager why I hadn’t received a note like I usually do. Although the details were sketchy and disjointed, it had something to do with a computer problem. I noticed that the computer running the patient records software ($3,500 program) was sitting under a desk – next to a space heater. When computer service work was required, the office administrator called an IT services company which would drive to the office and service the box.

Market opportunity: I thought to myself, if I was a dentist, I’d be willing to pay $100 / month to have this application hosted and available 24 x 7. I also noticed that according to the US Census Bureau, in 2000, there were 116,494 dental offices in the United States. Anybody interested in $140 million per year?

According to the Experts ...

The folks at IDC are predicting large growth in the U.S. Web hosting market. In a recent report they estimate that the current $8.2 billion market will become $16.3 billion by 2011.

For the first time, the report has a section dedicated to the issue of SaaS and how it will impact the growth of the hosting industry. About 10% of the report’s analysis is dedicated towards SaaS. There are quotes such as “the SaaS opportunity for hosting providers is real” but “it is unclear what the hosting provider’s role will be in the market”.

Since IDC says it is unclear, I would like to suggest that the hosting provider’s role should be “market leader and SaaS facilitator”. Today, all hosting providers offer SaaS – some offer applications, others offer IIS or Apache as a service instead of having the business run the web services on their premises.

Call to action: If you have success stories regarding deployment of real-world applications – post them on your website so the experts begin to acknowledge that hosting providers are the rightful owners of this trend.

SaaS is the future

SaaS is becoming an increasingly popular theme. Despite some skeptics, the industry is mostly very excited about the idea. In this blog, I’ll be following SaaS trend and provide my own thoughts and analysis. Let’s start with an introduction.

I’m Ilya Baimetov, Director of Technology at SWsoft. SWsoft provides management and automation software for hosting service providers. Control panels, service and user provisioning, billing – complete spectrum from cheap shrink-wrapped control panels to complex implementations tailored to the needs of particular customers. We also make Virtuozzo – an ultra-cool and a super-efficient server virtualization product. If you are in the hosting industry, you are our customer or at least you know about us.

SaaS (Software as a Service) is a distribution model, where software is delivered to its users as a service – ready-to-use, maintained by professionals and paid on a subscription basis. The major benefit is that SaaS allows each three parties – users, service providers and ISVs (independent software vendors) – to concentrate on their core competencies and delegate the rest to the experts. SaaS model brings the following benefits:

Users:

• Software can be acquired with no up-front fee.
• Zero or very short deployment time.
• Deployment, provisioning, operations, and maintenance are delegated to expert staff.
• Software is hosted in a data center free from Internet and power interruptions.
• Reduces support costs by eliminating the need for in-house expertise and 24x7 monitoring.
• Self-service control panels put users in direct control of their software where it deals with problem domain.

Providers:

• Opportunity to sell additional services with higher profit margins compared to selling raw infrastructure.
• No support calls for software upgrades.
• Admins can concentrate on their core competency – efficiently running the infrastructure. Problem domain related properties are delegated to the users.
• Easier accounting for billing/charge-backs.

ISVs:

• Offers channel into new markets – including small and medium sized businesses.
• Lower software distribution and deployment costs.
• More predictable recurrent revenues.
• Ability to respond to market faster because of the more centralized deployment.
• Ideally, no need to design all the infrastructural properties – high availability, scalability, storage management, etc. – into their applications. These properties are automatically provided or made very easy by the SaaS infrastructure.

However, SaaS is a paradigm shift for everyone:

• Users – need to adjust to self-service. I most cases, this is a welcome change – users like to be in control.
• Providers – need to learn how to build an infrastructure that allows quick integration of new services, supports fast and fully automatic service provisioning, and allows SLA-driven operation.
• ISVs – need to change design of their apps to implement strict division of responsibilities between users and admins (relatively easy) and multi-tenancy (very hard).

To help users, providers and ISVs move to SaaS, they need a platform they can use to jump-start their efforts. In my next post, I’ll analyze what are the aspects of a SaaS platform.