Technical Considerations before Choosing a SaaS Application Provider

When building a SaaS application, one needs to consider several technical aspects to ensure meeting of customer expectations and business needs.

1: Multi-tenancy
The SaaS application must support multi-tenancy so that it is seamless to use with multiple developers working on it. It is frustrating to have one person at a time working on the application. The single tenant applications also pose security risk where one might tamper into the code of another tenant. One of the main reasons to select a SaaS platform is multi-tenancy.

2: Zero-downtime setup
One can get away with downtime if you are working with internal applications. Many SaaS providers would tell its users to deal with it, and they will have no choice absolutely. On a SaaS model, customers know that the downtime for a year can be measured in minutes. The responsibility rests on efficient system and networking teams. Developers might also cause downtime but that is a case when things are already planned for.

Third-party services are sometimes down with loss of functionality in some cases. There might be a downtime because of upgrades and patches or because the debugging process is on. Server restoration also eats up time. SaaS applications do not have backup time for downtime.

3: Whether to commit to a vendor
The ideal applications in a SaaS model will help you to easily scale your application especially if it is a cloud vendor. This part gives ample freedom and flexibility with vendors. If a VM is offered with other services, one can use them in this regard. Scaling is not trivial always, which means it would involve system administration to some extent.

One can use cloud frameworks such as Microsoft's Windows Azure which can be automatically scaled up and offer geographical dispersion. But they tie you deeply to the vendor. They can be deployed locally with any type of vendor. But if the choice was not good at first, you will have to live with it unless you decide to rewrite the code.

4: Technical alignment with business
If an application is deployed in an organization, one need not worry about the technology. But for SaaS applications, one’s own business might create constraints for technical design. Resource usage is one such area. If the scaling process is not done at the same rate then one might have a big problem. Your application should be accurate in reporting the basis for metering when having an application for billing.

5: Scaling
Many applications do not scale well on some platforms. Not many platforms are designed to handle different scenarios like multi-tenancy and load balanced servers. These applications need to have a strong layer between data and application so that the data can be scaled up and down without affecting business logic and the presentation layer. Business logic should be provided with the help of APIs so that it enables connectivity between the systems of the partner and the customer. Not all applications will support these parts, but when developing SaaS applications, they are virtually mandatory.

The Ideal SaaS Development Platform and Amazon Web Services

Software development is better for most SaaS companies since product cycles are shorter, overall costs are reduced, and the technology is more current than any other. Existing software companies opt for their existing systems but one needs to opt for modern web technology to grow better while improving their ability with multi-tenant, web-centric software. Companies are required to evolve from legacy technologies including Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for embracing newer technologies of the future - HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery.

It is seen that bad software architecture is much more visible in SaaS products than the desktop ones. It has been evident that users find that some platforms do not scale well when run with multiple tenants on a simultaneous basis. Horizontal scaling might be possible, but one needs to be wary of inefficient use of resources which can amount to incredible cost of providing SaaS services. Developers need to know about the latency issues which might result in poor performance on public clouds. Security is extremely important to the architecture since there are simultaneous users on the shared platform protected by a single firewall.

The SaaS architecture requires itself to be absolutely fast, secure, and easy to use with an efficient data services layer. SaaS products need to consist of APIs for allowing development of some add-on capabilities. The published APIs are required to be dependable and standard and need to be maintained well.

Stateless designs for SaaS require well-organized storage services like Amazon’s Simple Storage Service which is not local to any single server and can be accessed through (RESTful) APIs. In the event when there is a server failure, the software managing the system will spring up another instance for replacing the failed compute instance with ready accessibility to data in the cloud infrastructure. The virtual server instances which are not required will be released and the app is then connected with another server instance at its next interaction.

The public cloud infrastructure does not offer support the bandwidth for storage virtualization without performance ramifications and plan. SaaS systems generate huge data which drive data analytics processes and hence the locality of both need to be the same SaaS companies are being more innovative nowadays and do not rely on software maintenance as before. Hence the users are in an advantageous position of getting to know about present innovations easier. Here SaaS companies need to be extremely careful that there should be no disruption to the customer’s environment. Software uptime is extremely critical and any downtime can affect a company’s fortunes. The backup needs to be resilient from failure.

Software upgrades are extremely complex since there should be no downtime and less maintenance window. There are mostly lengthy operations required for a software update. The cloud model helps in keeping the new release fully functional and running on the independent server before moving any tenants. Also the process of SaaS restructuring is quicker than the upgrade process which is time-consuming and might even cause unnecessary downtime.

SaaS and the advantages of a cloud computing world

The emergence of SaaS signaled the change in outlook on how we view the modes of software delivery. And now, the world is transforming its view on having everything on the cloud,

SaaS (Software as a Service) had almost lost the battle during the dot com bubble in 2001. While the concept was new and actually shifted the then present perception of IT implementations and deployment, the expectations were simply just too much. The dot com bubble destroyed SaaS but it managed to regain its stature and identity since then.

The concept of subscription based software development took the world by the storm since it encouraged hosted delivery and reduced the infrastructure overheads for different small and mid-sized companies. But not many could make use of the concept since the Internet bandwidth was not up to the mark for the success of SaaS delivery. Additionally, some software vendors were not keen in adjusting their pricing models since an all-money-up-front approach suited them the best. Subscription-based software licensing was based on deferred revenue collection and it took some years for vendors to switch to a SaaS pricing model.

The big players in the software development arena like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP had at first ignored and ridiculed the subscription-based approach. But even they had to comply with the changing demands of the market. The recent recession further narrowed every company’s pockets which forced them to opt for SaaS mode of software licensing.

Why are companies keen on opting for a SaaS subscription model?

Companies are keener about implementing a SaaS subscription-based software development model as they have to make changes to their plans due to increasing IT budget constraints. There are many enterprises who are trying to take their hardware and software maintenance expenses towards SaaS. The subscription-based licensing model as observed by analysts, is a lucrative and cost-efficient alternative with monthly or quarterly fee which makes it easier for companies. Moreover, there are no overheads related to software and hardware, which makes it easier for small companies too.

With a low upfront cost, subscription-based software development and deployment can help companies to develop newer applications without having to invest much. There are many companies nowadays who have offered SaaS based services. Adoption of SaaS and cloud computing technology is done by more than 11% of the US government agencies, according to a recent survey. The percentage of those users who are opting for SaaS pricing model is expected to treble in the next year or so.

Most of the deployments continue to center around different individual departmental initiatives. Vendors are providing diverse features for their end client’s end-to-end processes. Microsoft Azure and Amazon’s services are some examples of SaaS and cloud computing done right. It is necessary for companies to opt for the right implementation provider before finalizing on a service provider. The SaaS application development provider needs to be experienced in handling data security and scalability. Simplified deployment and implementation is crucial to the success of the client company. Nowadays, nearly every software development provider delivers SaaS services with the successful "pay as you go" subscription licensing model. Amazon, eBay and other companies have managed to hold on to people’s faith about doing business online. The hesitance of dealing with online stores has gone down considerably.

Elan Emerging Technologies is a Leading Multi Tenant Applications company that provides Subscription based services by highly experienced SaaS Developer with best technical support.