by Steve Bobrowski
Learn the basic concepts of "software as a service" architecture by building your own mini-SaaS application.
Whether you believe in creation, intelligent design, or Darwinism, evolution is an undeniable process that spans most everything around us. In nature, species evolve to survive in an ever-changing environment. And in business, well-managed companies evolve their business operations to compete better and increase profits.
One of the most prevalent trends in today's business world is an evolution toward the delivery and consumption of software as a service, or SaaS. This article explains some of the fundamental concepts, benefits, and implementation details of SaaS and provides a workshop on building a demonstration application so that developers and consumers can better understand and take advantage of this emerging technology.
Why SaaS?In the broadest sense, SaaS is an uncomplicated concept: customers access software as a hosted application over the Internet. So why is such a straightforward idea all the rage? Consider a simple example that compares how a medium-size or large business might implement a standard customer relationship management (CRM) application by taking two different approaches: the traditional on-premises, application ownership model versus the on-demand SaaS, or application subscriber model.
The traditional application ownership model typically requires a company to;Buy software and support licenses for an operating system, database, and CRM application
Purchase hardware (one or more servers and storage) to support the CRM application
Hire a staff of one or more administrators and consultants to install, configure, and maintain the CRM environment
From the customer's perspective, the total cost of ownership for the first year of owning a traditional CRM application would no doubt be hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention the ongoing annual costs to maintain it. From the CRM application developer's viewpoint, the pool of potential customers is limited to companies that can afford to pay the hefty price tag associated with owning and managing their own copy of the application.
Compare this with the simplified SaaS approach—a company just subscribes to a CRM software service for however many users require access. The company doesn't need to buy any special hardware or software and doesn't need to hire staff to install, configure, patch, monitor, and otherwise maintain operating systems, software, and data. The company's users do nothing more than use inexpensive PCs to load application pages into a standard Web browser and do their job. Consequently, the total cost of the company providing its users with a CRM application drops significantly. For example, one popular on-demand CRM solution, Salesforce, from salesforce.com, sells for as little as $140 per user per year! From the customer's point of view, the bottom line is certainly compelling—unless a company has thousands of users, subscribing to a CRM application is much more cost-effective than paying for the privilege of owning one outright.Application vendors can also benefit tremendously from a shift to SaaS. Low-cost commodity hardware and open source operating systems facilitate profitable hosting of SaaS applications, provided that the applications are well designed and scale as hundreds or thousands of users subscribe to their services. By passing on the reduced cost to customers, software vendors now have tremendous sales potential from new markets such as small businesses that were traditionally unapproachable with the application ownership model.Read the rest of this story...
Oracle SaaS Platform
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