Serving Up Bits Instead of Discs - Software Development Times On The Web

Serving Up Bits Instead of Discs
Software as a service model requires code rethinking, redesign
By Alex Handy

April 1, 2006 — Michael R. MacDonald, CEO of Visual Mining, has been selling his company’s chart and graphing software since 1996. His Maryland-based company, traditionally a commercial software firm, 10 months ago began a move toward offering software as a service (SaaS).

“We had started experimenting around with Salesforce.com’s APIs in late 2004. We were looking at doing a Salesforce.com plug-in for our software,” said MacDonald, who sat down for an interview at OpSource’s SaaS Summit in Napa, Calif., in late February. But as the project progressed, the job of integrating the company’s offline charting tools with Salesforce’s online data became too complex, he said. ”We knew there was no way [we] could do it simply enough. So we started to look closer at SaaS.”

MacDonald said that the move to a services-based model was spurred on by the trailblazers who’d already done it. “What changed the dynamic is that you’ve got companies like OpSource and Salesforce.com who have done the groundbreaking work. For us, it was relatively easy. It took 10 months to build, 30 days to deploy.” Visual Mining now offers both downloadable and SaaS versions of its software.

CONSTANT UPDATE
The ability to deploy continuous updates directly to the customers is a huge advantage of hosted SaaS applications over traditionally licensed software, according to Marc O’Brien, CEO and president of Projity, a San Mateo, Calif.-based company that offers a SaaS-based alternative to Microsoft Project.

O’Brien explained the road to SaaS requires tough decisions, and that those decisions apply to ISVs looking to switch as well as to companies like Projity that started out using the SaaS model. “There are obviously a lot of middleware standards that are still emerging, and even the platform choice is complex.”

O’Brien detailed the difficulties of integrating external apps and databases into the services-based architecture and said that decisions about middleware, databases, hosted architecture and hosted operating systems are fundamental.

“A bad choice made early on can cause havoc down the road if an integral piece of software falls behind, stops being updated, or simply becomes incompatible with the goals of the project,” he said.

O’Brien said that his company decided to use free software to build its infrastructure for two reasons: First, it required no initial outlay in funds to get the prototypes up and running; and second, his company competes directly with Microsoft, giving Projity extra incentive not to use Windows.

But Treb Ryan, CEO of services hosting company OpSource, which is promoting its services to help companies migrate to SaaS (and which hosted the February summit), said Microsoft gave his company a lot of licensing leeway, and now OpSource customers can get up and running on .NET for free. But, whether services companies choose .NET or Java, or Linux or Windows, the fundamental rules for success are the same, agreed Ryan and O’Brien.

Close Quarters for Data
Of supreme importance for a successful service design, O’Brien said, is multi-tenancy, which he described as the use of one database for all clients, rather than storing each individual user’s [hosted] information on separate servers. “Multi-tenancy must be a goal of the initial design document because security and performance issues associated with multi-tenancy must be addressed at the most basic levels of the codebase.”

Ryan agreed that the multi-tenancy issue is paramount and is a primary difference between SaaS and application hosting, where the hosted applications often run on dedicated servers for each customer, and where the applications might be customized for each customer’s needs. To be successfully deployed as SaaS, Ryan said that all customers have to be running the same application. “If you do not do that, all you’re doing is buying servers for every single customer” and losing the advantage of economies of scale, he explained.

Ryan said that the mindset of companies looking to move from retail to services must change. “In a traditional software company, getting it gold by the release date is critical. If you don’t, the sales guys have nothing to sell, and you’ll be killed by Wall Street. In a SaaS organization, you now have a development team who has to continue to add features on a regular basis. You have to have guys who write tight, clean, efficient code. That’s never been a real big concern for enterprise application vendors before.”

Ryan continued to skewer the quality of boxed software. He said that in traditional retail or channel models, nonfunctional software is sometimes seen as the customer’s problem. He said that a typical tech support call would find the ISV troubleshooting the customer’s desktop, evaluating the functionality of the end user’s machine and his installed software packages. With SaaS, however, Ryan said that 100 percent of the problems encountered will be the vendor’s fault “unless the [network interface] card on the end user’s computer is broken.”

But, Ryan said, there are great benefits that offset this new focus on code quality. “The great give-back for all this, though, is that they don’t have to go test on 19,000 different systems.” Ryan said that SaaS programs need to work only on the specific hardware and software that the SaaS host uses. By contrast, traditional commercial software might need to support a dozen different versions of Oracle running on various versions of Windows, and all the combinations thereof. “SaaS takes a lot of time out of QA so you can focus on writing cleaner code with better efficiency,” Ryan added.

Another sticking point, said O’Brien, is that moving to SaaS will likely cause the sales team to become disgruntled. O’Brien suggested addressing the interdepartmental strife that moving to a services model can cause. “The very first thing you would have to do is rationalize this within your existing business structure, and convince your vice president of sales that there would be a tectonic shift in sales commissions, and convince your board to accept near-term losses.”

Despite the difficulty of the transition, MacDonald is glad his company is moving to SaaS. “I believe that SaaS is where [the software industry] is going to be,” said MacDonald. “We used to use an on-site CRM system which caused all kinds of problems. When we moved to Salesforce.com, we didn’t have to have IT staff fixing it all the time. We understand the benefit to customers.”

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE

SEND FEEDBACK