SaaSify!

With the rise of software as a service, applications providers are scrambling to transform their solutions and how CIOs consume software.

Given a tough economy and tight IT budgets, how can CIOs best provide the software their enterprises need? Increasingly, by offering enterprise applications including HR systems, ERP and CRM in the form of Web-based services. And at many businesses of all sizes, CIOs are offering on-demand Software as a Service (SaaS) delivered directly from the cloud to employees computers and mobile devices.

But theres a catch: Many makers of business software arent ready. For a variety of reasons, they dont yet offer SaaS versions of their applications.

To be fair, many if not most business-solutions providers are now scrambling to SaaS-ify their applications. They must, if they want to retain current customers

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and attract new ones. Increasingly, both new and existing customers want their software delivered as an on-demand service.

But solutions providers find that transforming their existing software packages into reliable and secure Web-based services ones that can scale up to serve thousands of customers at once is no easy task. Rewriting code for multitenancy takes time and money, resources many companies can ill afford.

Fortunately, virtualization technology has emerged that helps make apps ready for SaaS, and ready for new markets, too. Virtualization makes it possible to provision new instances of an application and the underlying technology stack at the proverbial push of a button.

Yet if the goal is to create the basis for an industrial-strength SaaS offering, then simply virtualizing an application isnt enough. Theres still a good deal of set-up, configuring and testing to do.

As a result, a growing number of software companies and hosting providers have begun working with more-comprehensive virtualization platforms. These include CA AppLogic, a turnkey application-centric cloud platform offered by CA Technologies. This type of solution is attracting software makers eager to respond and benefit from the growing demand for SaaS-ified solutions.

Rocket Booster

One factor driving the demand for SaaS solutions is the recession of 2008 and its aftermath the real rocket booster for the SaaS market, says Kevin Dobbs, Managing Partner of Montclair Advisors, a SaaS consulting firm. Once banks stopped lending, companies couldnt invest in the kinds of software installations they had traditionally undertaken, he explains. SaaS offered the companies a way to use software with no infrastructure to buy and no technology to maintain. No wonder, Dobbs adds, that all software companies have had to start looking at the SaaS model.

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Another factor driving the new delivery model is the consumerization of IT. End users have smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, and they have already become accustomed to using cloud applications such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Google. Now they want the same consumption model for their enterprise software, says Roy Pater, Co-founder and Director of InfraServe, an Australian wholesale cloud services provider that helps software providers launch SaaS offerings. End users no longer want to worry about how to make it all work. They just want to use it.

The notion of providing online access to remotely hosted enterprise software products is hardly new. It first was broached in the late 1990s by a handful of application service providers (ASPs). But because the ASPs did little more than host packaged apps one copy at a time, they were unable to scale. Most quietly faded away.

Today, thanks to the ubiquitous Web and powerful virtualization technologies, SaaS is proving much more viable, both technically and economically. The result: Seemingly every software provider is answering the call of the cloud.

This, in turn, has inspired many managed service providers (MSPs), telecommunications companies, colocation vendors and hosting providers to beef up their data centers and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings specifically to deliver SaaS.

One major challenge is helping software firms transform their existing software packages into flexible hosted services, and then deliver the responsiveness, reliability and security that their enterprise customers expect. CIOs want the ability to consume apps from the cloud as easily and comfortably as if they themselves were running those apps, says Peter Sherr, Senior VP and General Manager, Service Providers, at CA Technologies, who is leading the companys efforts to serve the burgeoning MSP market.

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That desire has IT executives asking some tough questions of potential SaaS providers, Sherr says. For example: Where is my data being kept? How secure is the facility where your code is running? How well is my data protected while in transit between your data center and my end users? How reliable is your service? Whom can I call if something goes wrong? And when it comes to successfully delivering SaaS, Sherr says, How well service providers answer these questions will separate the leaders from the rest of the pack.

Small Is Big

The types of software getting SaaS-ified run the gamut. Dan Pellegrini, Director of SaaS at provider Logicalis U.S., sees opportunity in financial services, manufacturing and healthcare. Many ISVs [independent software vendors] have the code and the customers, but lack the knowledge and the resources to move it to a cloud-based solution, he says. We can help with that transition by providing a model that includes sample contracts, billing and financial justification, even help [the ISV] write business plans.

Regional hosting firms see a big opportunity in SaaS, too. Theyre ready to manage and monitor enterprise-class software services and provide end-user support in ways the bigger players do not and perhaps cannot. We provide a managed cloud environment thats dedicated to a particular ISV and customized to their needs, says Jason Carolan, VP of Product Development at ViaWest Inc. The Denver, Colo.-based super regional hosting firm operates 22 data centers across five regions, offering colocation, complex hosting, cloud and managed services. Carolan says ViaWests offerings differ from a typical large-scale public cloud, where many clients are thrown together to share infrastructure, and services may be offered on a one size fits all basis.

Regional hosting companies also point to their ability to tailor network connections and management services to the needs of SaaS clients. For example, ViaWest can connect its data center to a SaaS customers premises with a dedicated multi-gigabit connection, which outperforms the shared public Internet typically relied on by larger providers. The regional companies may also be physically closer to the SaaS providers customers, reducing network latency.

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The regional companies also offer well-staffed network operations centers, enterprise-class IT management systems and 24x7 help desks. They can address issues of data governance and auditing, which are vital for certain applications, industries and countries, too. Were able to provide responsiveness and a local touch, Carolan of ViaWest says.

Another company, Houston-based StratITsphere, provides hosting services to customers in the energy sector. Its recent offering, the Nimbus cloud computing service, helps customers use the cloud to simplify their operations. While most companies are looking to cut expenses, our customers are more interested in escaping the complexities and hassles involved in creating and maintaining an IT infrastructure, says Stephen Webster, President and CEO of StratITsphere. Its much more convenient and efficient for them to partner with a quality service provider with a good SLA [Service Level Agreement], and pay a monthly per-user fee.

Regardless of their applications or the industries they serve, ISVs moving to SaaS have their work cut out for them. The critical issue, says Dobbs of Montclair Advisors, is that companies must find a scalable platform. The last thing they want to do when adding each new customer is to buy a blade server, load it with a database and operating system, then test it and load data, Dobbs explains. That could take three or four months, and theyd need a huge staff to build out their SaaS infrastructure.

SAAS PACKS ITS BAGS

Moving to Software as a Service (SaaS) in the cloud promises to help software makers break into new markets, at home and abroad. Thats especially true if software companies use the CA AppLogic turnkey cloud computing platform to host their code. Delivered over the Web, software services can, in theory, reach markets around the world. But in practice, organizations located too far from a SaaS hosting facility will suffer sluggish response times. Thats due mainly to the inevitable latency, or delays, in connections made over the public Internet.

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The obvious answer: Host the SaaS code in, or at least closer to, overseas markets. Unfortunately, that takes time and effort. Potential hosting partners must be evaluated. SaaS software must be installed in multiple locations. And billing procedures must be set up in local currencies. But software makers working with the CA AppLogic platform should find the going much easier. Currently, more than 400 hosting companies run CA AppLogic-equipped infrastructure grids in Europe, the Middle East, China, Australia and elsewhere. All these facilities are, by definition, potential hosting sites for CA AppLogic-based SaaS offerings. To enter a new market, all a provider has to do is identify an appropriate hosting firm, negotiate a hosting contract, and then send its CA AppLogic-ready appservice appliance to that firms grid. More or less automatically, the appliance will be configured and ready to provide its business application service to organizations. That will be true whether those are local enterprises or branch offices of enterprises headquartered elsewhere. Each CA AppLogic grid offers a stable, well-defined and highly agile platform thats ready to host any properly packaged appliance. In essence, its a preconfigured collection of virtualized resources. This platform, in turn, connects the guest appliance to locally supplied services such as billing, service management and identity management, each of which will be localized. As part of an effort to encourage such remote hosting of business application services, CA Technologies has launched Cloud Commons, an online cloud community, developer studio, test grid and marketplace. There, CA AppLogic-ready hosting companies and independent software vendors (ISVs) can find, evaluate and do business with each other. In fact, the Cloud Commons ecosystem not only supports CA AppLogic customers, but also offers a wide range of other cloud-based solutions from both CA Technologies and third-party companies. And its Developer Studio component enables developers and ISVs to quickly create, test and certify cloud services designed to run on the CA AppLogic platform. J.W.V.

Virtually a Service

Although virtualization technology helps with the Saas-ifying process, each instance still needs some amount of server, storage and networking capacity not to mention firewall, load balancer, app servers, Web servers and a database server or two. Each instance also will need to call on services, such as identity management and billing, and perhaps connect to third-party apps or content sources. In other words, simply virtualizing an application is just the beginning.

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Thats where the CA AppLogic platform comes in. This comprehensive virtualization platform encapsulates in a single, well-defined collection of virtualized resources not only a business application itself, but also all the software, hardware and IT services it may require. This collection, called a virtual appliance, is then ready to run on a grid of servers and other hardware resources. This grid is controlled by a layer of CA AppLogic software that creates a well-defined platform. All this means an app is ready in a matter of minutes with all the needed performance and specific features.

Each virtual appliance typically contains multiple virtual machines (VM) one for each of the application, compute, Web and database servers that the core business application requires. Just like a standard VM, this virtual appliance is actually just a computer file. That means it can be copied, backed up, deleted, moved, stored and retrieved as easily and rapidly as any other file. Whats more,

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all of the virtual appliances most important operating characteristics its transaction-processing capacity, the size of its database and more can be customized simply by adjusting a set of parameters.

This level of agility makes the CA AppLogic platform particularly attractive as a way to instantly turn current enterprise software into highly scalable SaaS services. In part, thats because these virtual appliances can be reconfigured and provisioned as many times as necessary. This is possible because the CA AppLogic virtualization scheme effectively decouples the application from its underlying infrastructure, thereby eliminating the need for human intervention. AppLogic is a very elaborate product that makes deployment of any software into the cloud very simple, says Pater of InfraServe. It also enables our partners to add capacity as needed, one slice at a time.

Thats in contrast to the traditional provisioning of hardware, Pater adds. That approach often results in buying too large a physical server just in case, is the common thinking then seeing much of its capacity left unused.

Most important, Pater adds, With our AppLogic platform we get software firms into the SaaS market without them having to re-architect their code to be a multi-tenancy product. Also, software firms can assure their customers of high levels of data security; in effect, each instance uses its own dedicated copy of the application, running on its own virtualized platform, and with its own firewall. At the same time, maintaining the software is greatly simplified. Changes made to the master copy of the software get automatically pushed out to all the other instances on a CA AppLogic grid.

And so, the SaaS revolution has begun. How it will ultimately change the delivery and use of IT is difficult to predict. But two things look certain: First, CIOs are about to have a longstanding prayer answered: better service with less effort on their part. And second, the software industry will likely never be the same.

John W. Verity writes about technology from Santa Rosa, Calif.

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