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Introduction
Much has been written on the advantages of delivering software as a service (SaaS). In this "hosted" or "on-demand" model vendors ship no software to the customer and provide a fully hosted web-based solution accessible over the Internet. Customers benefit from reduced costs and complexity in that no hardware needs to be purchased and no software installation is required. Yet, SaaS has many disadvantages as well. SaaS faces issues such as system outages, unpredictable performance, community security, loss of data control and high costs over time. Recently, one of the downsides of software as a service has come to light in the highly publicized service outages that have plagued some major vendors.
Appliance-based software delivery provides all the benefits of on-demand solutions, but with none of the drawbacks. Appliance-based software solutions bundle hardware and software into a pre-installed, pre-tuned bundle that can be simply plugged into a network for immediate use. Appliance-based solutions also provide a highly secure solution that is hardened against threats, and allows organizations to remain in firm possession of their data. Appliance-based solutions eliminate the need to procure hardware, install software or configure solutions for failover, backup, and recovery.
The Need for New Software Delivery Models
Today's enterprise software market offers a variety of business automation solutions for companies of all sizes. Solutions include customer relationship management, messaging, enterprise resource management, IT management, business analytics and logistics.
The need for these software solutions is unquestionable in today's fast paced and global business market. All sectors of today's global economy rely on software solutions to fuel 7x24 operations in both the back-office and on the front line. Today's IT staffs demand 100% "operationally ready" and completely "fault resistant" or even "fault proof" solutions with the aid of hot-swappable standby systems.
The operational readiness, maintainability, and durability of today's software solutions are directly tied to the "delivery model" or "delivery platform" of the software itself. Historically, enterprise software has been delivered and distributed to corporate customers on media ranging from floppy disks to CDs to DVDs. In some cases, software is shipped via ftp or other network transfer protocols. In these cases, the customer is forced to work independently or with the software vendor to specify, size, acquire, install, configure, tune, maintain, and manage the hardware system(s) that will be hosting the respective software solution. The delivery model in this case provides no help in the ongoing operational support of the software system. In fact, the original media that such software is installed from often is discarded, lost, or antiquated by the time the total system is production ready and active.
Traditional software delivery has also been difficult for software vendors to support. Since traditional software delivery requires customers to procure the hardware platform separately, software vendors have to support a wide variety of hardware configurations and operating systems. The development, maintenance, and testing cost for supporting a wide range of platforms and OS versions is large and comprises a significant percentage of development and testing cost for any traditional software vendor.
These costs and complexities of traditional software delivery have led to the introduction of new software delivery models to simplify software development, testing, deployment and maintenance. Two of the most popular models are software delivered as a service and appliance-based delivery.
What about Software as a Service (SaaS)?
Software delivered as an Internet service or "on-demand" has many advantages over traditional software delivery. As a service it allows end-user organizations to avoid the costs and complexity of procuring and configuring hardware and installing and configuring software. Vendors can focus development, testing, and maintenance on one stack of hardware, operating system and application server software. Unfortunately, SaaS has considerable disadvantages around reliability, performance, security, and cost.
Since SaaS applications are delivered via the Internet and a multi-tenant shared infrastructure, there are many failure points that can create a service outage. For example, large spikes in usage, denial of service attacks against the vendor, application upgrades or hardware failure can bring the system down unexpectedly for all end-user organizations. In addition, scheduled maintenance, upgrades and downtime occurs at the vendor's discretion, and not when most convenient for a particular end-user organization. This creates significant reliability concerns for mission critical business applications.
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