Customer Relationship Management

SaaS is no longer solely for the start-up software firm in the current IT scenario as was considered when it was introduced initially. Enterprise software developers, big and small, have started offering SaaS based mainstream applications to keep up with the market demands.  With customers seeking rigorous specifications and setting high expectation standards, application development process has evolved into a whole new segment with a lot of constraints, making the competition fierce in the current scenario with big players beginning to adopt the SaaS delivery model to internal applications by redesigning applications around SOA back ends and RIA interfaces.

So where does SaaS head now? In the current market scenario, one can see a lot of paths being taken. But two paths that have attracted recent attention are the ones where in SaaS is going towards an integrated path leading into the realm of Cloud Computing and where SaaS is shifting into a PaaS model?

"Platform as a service (PaaS) is the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. It facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers, providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet"[2]—with no software downloads or installation for developers, IT managers or end-users. It's also known as cloudware. PaaS, or "Platform as a Service" could be the new acronym that defines a web-oriented model where in more than just specific vertical "services" are delivered as SaaS (e.g CRM, ERP, etc).

PaaS offerings include workflow facilities for application design, application development, testing, deployment and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation and developer community facilitation. These services are provisioned as an integrated solution over the web.

PaaS speaks to a more generalized services platform concept. If we consider the "web as a platform" as a notion of multiple services in the cloud, then PaaS treats these services as several mashup design patterns where the customer is given the option to choose from. These patterns are part of a continuum ranging from pure browser presentation mashups to client-side mashups onto the server-side services and data mashups. Architecturally speaking, when someone considers the composite applications pattern for delivering the SaaS apps, it is where PaaS steps in.

"Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet."[3] Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them.

"The concept incorporates infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) as well as other technology buzzwords that have the common theme of reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. Cloud computing services usually provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers." [3]

"The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams, and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals." [3]

While Cloud computing is still at an early stage, with a varied mixture of large and small providers delivering a mix of cloud-based services, from full-blown applications to storage services to spam filtering. For the most part, in today’s existing scenario IT must plug into cloud-based services individually, until cloud computing aggregators and integrators emerge completely. With cloud-based interconnection seldom in evidence, cloud computing can be merely described as "sky computing".[4]

So are we going to see a shift of SaaS towards integrating into Cloud Computing or evolve into a more-efficient PaaS, only time can tell? But with the demands of industry growing by the day, the future of SaaS seems to be secure either through Cloud Computing or through PaaS.