Serving Up Bits Instead of Discs
Software as a service model requires code rethinking, redesign
April 1, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 3)
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.
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