Low-risk, pay-as-you-go SaaS Components
Uncertain economic conditions are pushing IT decision makers to go beyond traditional IT levers to broaden their scope of action. There is a growing pressure to move business applications to the cloud. However, not every application is easy to move to the cloud, for a variety of reasons. One, the application may be unique to your business, and as such may not be a vendor providing it. Two, the data used by that application may be too sensitive to move beyond the company firewalls. Or simply, the comfort factor for moving it outside the firewall may be missing, because the application is strategically core to your business and confers a unique competitive advantage on the company.
Given these constraints, the IT decision maker is stuck with having to build and maintain the application on-premise, leading to higher up-front costs and risks. How do you then take a bunch of work off your staff and infrastructure?
A new and rapidly developing niche of SaaS components is developing in response to this challenge. Whereas whole applications may be hard to move to the cloud, it may be feasible to build such applications using components which are out in the cloud. To state an analogy, it is rather like an online retailer using FedEx as a service component for handling the shipping of goods.
A SaaS component is simply a packaged functionality with clear interfaces which can be easily plugged and configured to a web application. The big advantage of using SaaS components in your internal projects is easy to see: projects remain internal but certain pieces use SaaS from the cloud, reducing the development, maintenance and infrastructural costs. |
