SaaS requirements for Large Enterprises

Thanks to Annie once again for forwarding me the article on SaaS Star leaves SAP SalesForce.com. Executives moving to competitors is nothing new it was not long back that most CEO's of large software companies in the Silicon Valley were Oracle Alumni. As Larry could not retain them - he went and bought them :). Sorry - I digress.

While reading the article - the following quote caught my eye.

“SAP doesn’t have a SaaS strategy,” he (Steve Lucas) told me. “They don’t have a single piece of paper that states what their SaaS strategy is.”


I don't know Steve but if he has already made this statement to the executives of SAP while he was there - they kudos to him, otherwise this is Salesforce.com PR at work (and very good at that).

Don't get me wrong - I like Salesforce.com, they are a great company and the market leader in the SaaS environment. A couple of months back I did develop a "Application Portfolio and Time Reporting" prototype - it took me a couple of days to prototype, very easy to develop (no code required) and shall gladly share it with anyone who is interested.

The focus on AppExchange (or Platform-as-a-Service) by SalesForce.com is pioneering and a great endeavor. However, in my opinion - most SaaS solution providers (and platforms) are focused and excellent for delivering point solutions - such as Sales Force Automation (or CRM like SalesFoce.com), Financial, HR, Inventory Management (CRM and ERP like NetSuite), Payroll, Financial and Tax Reporting (such as Intuit) targeting Small and Medium business. In addition, there are most probably hundreds of other start-ups currently in the process of developing SaaS Platforms (Coghead, saas, etc. and I expect to hear from the rest of them). SAP has very clearly stated that their SaaS solution -Business by Design is targeted for small and medium business (for now). As for Oracle - Larry Ellison already has stake in SalesForce.com and Netsuite and will acquire one or both of them after they demonstrate that they can scale out to large enterprises (or $$$$ - which ever comes first).

Following are some of the high-level SaaS (platform) requirements(on paper/blog :) ) in my opinion for large enterprises. These requirements are focused primarily on the platform, rather than the application/solution.

• The platform should meet all the technical requirements such as availability, reliability, security, standards, etc. (most SaaS solutions do support this)
• Decouple the platform into - User Interaction (portal), Business Logic and Domain (data) layers. Not supported by a single SaaS provider (that I know of).
  
• User Interaction - only the presentation is provided and hosted by the SaaS provider and all the business logic and data is stored somewhere else. Sample use case could be: User Interaction hosted by SalesForce.com, Business Logic hosted by SAP (Business By Design) and Data hosted by Oracle on-demand.
• Use standard development tools such as Eclipses and code could be deployed both on-site as well as SaaS platform. Today in most cases it is not possible to reuse code between SaaS and in-house development. It would great if the same code could be deployed both on the SaaS platform as well as on-premise infrastructure.
• Unrestricted near real-time data services will be key to meeting the needs of large enterprise.

Let me try and break this down in more details:

User Interaction:

• Support multi-channels - supported by most of the current provides
• On-line - Off-line capability - none of them do so as yet. I did like the Alchemy product initiated by BEA in 2004 - which was sadly discontinued after Adam Bosworth left BEA. There needs to a capability of develop a solution once which supports both multi-channel as well as off-line / on-line capability.
• Develop using standard tools and deploy it on SaaS or in-house infrastructure. Major SaaS vendors do support this for Perl, PHP or Ruby but not for Java or .Net (that I know of) - smaller ones do support Java, Flex, AJAX, etc.

Business Logic

• Based on standards such as BPEL, XPDL or native code (java, Perl, PHP, Ruby or .Net). Most major SaaS vendors do not as yet support standards but do support native code. In addition, developers could use their on-line (graphical) developer tools to model the business process/logic. However, the code is not deploy able within the enterprise.
• Ability to decouple the business rules/polices from the business process. Supported by develop custom code - expect this to mature over the next two years. The Business Rules engine (such as ILog, Drools) could be deployed within the enterprise.

Domain (data) Layer

• To me this is the data grid - that support distributed data (which also includes the meta-data that drives the entire solution)
• Developer should be able to model any simple or composite object and deploy this on the grid.
• Based on the operations (CRUD) the data layer shall perform the operation on the appropriate data source
• Ability to support events and alerts to trigger action (support Event Driven Architecture) which could also be used as a Business State Machine.
• Provide real-time performance - key requirements for next generation BI solutions
• Other than SalesForce.com and Coghead - I have not come across other players that provide this capability. Their solutions are still transactional and need to be extended to provide near real-time performance. It would be ideal for the SaaS providers to leverage tools like Oracle Coherence (Tangosol), GigaSpaces, Java Space orSAP In-memory database in cobination with EII tools such as MetaMatrix, Composite orAquaLogic DSP to provide the foundation of this layer.

Over the next few years - I expect large enterprises to start adoption point SaaS solutions with IT organizations primarily focusing on integrating the enterprise. I hope by that time we shall get a standards based platform that needs one and only one development tool and give IT organizations the option of deploying the solution either within the enterprise or on on the platform of a SaaS provider.

Maybe - what we really needs is a Services-Oriented Operation System :). As always do feel free to drop me line with your comments and/or feedback.

- Yogish