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Life in the SaaS Lane

Chances are you have heard a lot of talk about software-as-a-service (SaaS) - or its sister terms like on-demand, managed services, the scoop du jour - cloud computing, and for people who have been around the software industry for awhile, application service providers. All of these terms have slightly different meanings, but the bottom line is that a vendor is offering to manage your applications and web hosting for you.

SaaS is a very good thing for many organizations. You do not need to worry about managing servers, security and upgrades, and can avoid large upfront license agreements. When you calculate all of the costs, you usually come out ahead with SaaS. But SaaS is not really about cost. It is about focus. In this economy focus is more important than ever. Unless your core competency happens to be managing software - SaaS is a compelling option for the simple reason it give you one less thing to worry about in your business. Interestingly, most of our SaaS customers are large corporations who have plenty of IT resources.

So let's assume for minute you want to go with a SaaS solution for your web CMS. The next question, what type of service is the best fit for you?

The Web CMS industry presents buyers a plethora of options: SaaS-only vendors; vendors offering managed services; or partners who provide managed hosting services. The simplest way to divide the market is by vendors offering software using multi-tenancy vs. virtualization. To me, virtualization is by far more appealing for customers and vendors. Many people would question this wisdom, but I think it is not even a close call. Here is why...

Multi-tenancy means that the vendor has built one application that they can put many customers into. The classic example of this is Salesforce.com. With Salesforce.com everyone logs into the same application. The software partitions the customers and data and everyone shares the same infrastructure. The software vendor wins because they can add new customers into the system at a very low cost. The customer wins because they get access to a fully managed application.

The problem is that multi-tenancy is generally one size fits all and most SaaS vendors are not Salesforce.com. They do not have the same resources to support an application with all of the customizations and flexibility to meet real customer business requirements. In web CMS the application is almost fully dependent on the website implementation. Websites are definitely not one size fits all. They are also customer facing and often manage very critical data that need to be delivered to support marketing and business programs and often interface with third-party applications.

Enter virtualization. Virtualization has changed computing. With virtualization you can take one server and partition it into many virtual servers, each with dedicated storage, processing, memory, and security.

With virtualization each customer gets their own dedicated server with all of the flexibility that comes with it: Upgrade when you want, manage file level access, write customizations and integrations, install additional applications or databases, and perhaps most importantly, move the application whole cart into your own servers if you want in the future. (...try that with multi-tenancy). Given the fact that several SaaS CMS vendors have exited the market the ability to migrate your data and/or the application cannot be over-valued.

From a custom perspective, the only downside of virtualization that I can see is scalability. You are limited to the parameters of your server, though floating resources can fill in the gaps. In practice this is never an issue because the applications services are very predictable and usually pretty low load. With Ingeniux CMS our application is separate from your live website. We never have thousands of people working inside a CMS application at the same time. Your live production web-server is where the traffic spikes can occur and planning for these spikes is part of any good SaaS deployment plan.

With Ingeniux OnDemand, our hosted CMS solution, we offer several different web deployment options for SaaS. Many customers use our Shared Web hosting service. This is a managed production website environment with multiple load-balanced servers. It scales up nicely for most deployments and it is fully managed by the Ingeniux team.

Other customers want to own the hosting environment for their live site. In that case we can replicate the content to their network. Other customers manage extremely high-traffic media sites that require near infinite scalability. In this case they publish to cloud computing environments like Amazon EC2 or a global content delivery network like LimeLight Networks or EdgeCast, that can meet their spikes.

The last consideration with going with a SaaS CMS option is if it is better to work with a partner who provides hosting services or with a software vendor that has vertically integrated hosting. Personally, I would always opt for a vendor managed solution for one reason - accountability. You want one number to call when there are support issues. You do not want two parties pointing fingers while you are in the middle. A software vendor is in the best position to support their own application and assuming they have been hosting for a while should be able to provide a strong level of service.

If you are planning on moving to a Web CMS SaaS is definitely an option you should consider. To learn more about SaaS hosting options with Ingeniux feel free to contact one of our solutions experts today by calling 1-877-445-8228 or emailing info@Ingeniux.com.

Posted by David Hillis at 4:00 pm