Techcello Survey 2012 - On the Road to SaaS where are you?

We did a simple survey in 2011 titled “On the road to SaaS Where are You?". The results were shared free of cost with all the participants. Many of them benefited from knowing where they are viz-a-viz the rest of the market and it helped them plan their roadmap better.

Now we are back again in 2012, with a similar survey. But this time it covers 3 dimensions : Cloud, SaaS and Multi-tenancy.

The online survey has 5 questions and it will take less than 2 minutes. Like last year, we will share the results with all the participants. You can then plot your future strategy after taking in to consideration the speed and direction in which the market is moving, combined with your own unique position in the technology – market space.

The identity of the participants and the data provided by each participant, will be kept confidential. Only summary and trend results will be published.

Please click on this link below to complete this 2 minute survey.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=y410z282uSMtI43GQ0qTPg_3d_3d

An Insight into Multi Tenant Architecture

Any single-tenant application that’s ported unchanged to a multi-tenant platform, no matter how much multi-tenancy is ‘injected’ into it, will not derive the full benefit of multi-tenancy until it has been rearchitected or written anew.

1. Customizability - If your application is not designed for customizability and configurability using a meta data based approach then emulation of multi-tenancy can make you technically ready for SaaS, but in the market place, are you going to force all your customers to use a standardised version of your product. What if each tenant wants the data model to be extended, forms and grids to be customized, or the notification templates to be custom designed.

2. Business rules and Workflows: If your existing application does not generalize and externalize the business rules and workflows out of your code base, you will not be able to support the diverse needs of different verticals and customer organizations using your product. The ability to customize the business rules and workflows at the tenant level is an important business need that you should architect for.

3. On the other hand, if you have architected your application for such extensive customization and configuration for each customer (from UI to datamodels to workflows), then even if you are not offering your product on the cloud, or if you are not offering it as a SaaS, you will still save a lot of money on implementation costs and maintenance costs. (As compared to maintaining a separate code base for each customer).

So a true multi-tenant architecture is not only about database sharing and data isolation, it is also about the ability of the application architecture to fulfill the diverse needs of multiple tenants / customers / user groups, by customizing and configuring data models, permissions, data scope policies, UI, rules, workflows etc. and still maintain a single code base.

In that sense whether or not an application needs a true multi-tenant architecture is as much a business decision as it is technical

On the road to SaaS, where are you? – Single click survey results

Techcello recently conducted a survey among ISVs, to understand their thought process and questions about SaaS.

• 20% of the ISVs are still asking : Are we ready for SaaS (O1)?
• 36% of the ISVs are asking questions and evaluating alternatives on :- infrastructure(O2), development platforms(O3,O4), application & data architecture(O5, O6), Technology stacks & Frameworks (O7,O8).
• 3% of the ISVs are already in the market with a multi-tenant SaaS product built on top of a APaaS. (O9)
• 41% of the ISVs are already in the market with a SaaS product built on top of their own home grown stack(O10).

 You can see the complete survey format here

Multi-tenant architecture for Enterprises?

The world is shrinking and the traditional boundaries between Desktop, Client-Server, Web and Cloud technologies are getting blurred. While some of your business applications should be strictly on-premise, some have to move to the private cloud and some more to the public cloud.

The users of today’s applications are spread across product divisions, geographies, business units, upstream vendors, downstream partners and customers. Configurability and customization requirements, security and data-scope policies, data isolation and scalability requirements, administration and reporting needs, all these can be quite diverse. The challenges of architecting and engineering such applications are many.

While SaaS as a business model may not be relevant to an enterprise application, multi-tenant architecture and SaaS like features can substantially reduce the operational and infrastructure costs of an enterprise.

Let us look at some examples that we have recently come across:

One enterprise with a strong franchisee model, is thinking of migrating its application to a multi-tenant architecture. The objective is to bill its franchisees for the usage of IT infrastructure and applications on a monthly variable model, instead of a fixed upfront cost.

A BPO is building a multi-tenant platform to manage its processes, but would be sharing the same application with all its clients.

And there is a large enterprise that is wondering whether it would make economic sense to build a single multi-tenant app. to be used by various SBUs, products, geographical units and subsidaries (each unit to be treated like a tenant).

Why not? Data isolation, data scoping and access control, horizontal scaling, tenant wise customizability and configurability, hosting on a hybrid but elastic infrastructure, single code base, ease of maintenance, reduced opex all these could indeed give this enterprise unparalleled cost savings and benefits.

Vendor management and e-procurement are some other examples where a multi-tenant architecture could be considered.

So thinking about the cloud, is not just about moving or not moving your existing applications and infrastructure to the cloud. It is also about re-thinking your application development framework and how you can leverage the benefits of a Multi-tenant architecture.

So whether you are building a new application or planning to migrate an existing application, you should carefully evaluate the kind of engineering stack that you would like to build (or buy).

Disclosure : Techcello will soon be launching another product called “Cello Frame” : – a Multi-tenant Development Framework for Enterprises.

Only 15% ISVs prefer proprietary SaaS platforms

Techcello recently conducted a survey among ISVs on SaaS : Engineering factors.

Inspite of the faster time to market that is inherent in many proprietary SaaS platforms, an overwhelming no. of ISVs (85%) prefer the flexibility and control offered by industry standard programming models such as .Net and J2EE.  However more than 45% expressed the need for a third alternative that gives them the freedom, flexibility and control of these traditional application platforms, without the complexities, risks, cost and time  overheads of building and maintaining their own SaaS engineering stack.

Another interesting finding is that preference between Microsoft .Net and Open source / Java is almost equally split.

More than 60% ISVs prefer to build or buy a SaaS engineering stack before proceeding with the development of business functions, whereas the remaining 40% would allow the engineering and architecture of the product to evolve parallely, while the business functions are being  built.
When asked about the challenging aspects of building a multi-tenant SaaS product : 65% mentioned ”ability to customize the product for each tenant”. 55% mentioned ”access control privileges and security policies that are unique to each tenant”.

SaaS operationalization aspects such as metering, tenant provisioning and subscription management, were not considered as challenging as customization and security.

Survey Results:

15% would prefer to build their product on PaaS in spite of the platform lock-in and monthly recurring cost
40% would prefer industry standard programming models with complete flexibility and control and would use cloud providers only for hosting and infrastructure scaling.
45% would prefer an option that combines the flexibility and control of option 2 with the speed of option 1.
45% would prefer to use Microsoft .Net technology stack
55% would prefer to use open source / Java technology stack
40% would allow the engineering and architecture of the product to evolve parallely while the business functionalities are being built
60% would first build or buy a SaaS engineering stack / framework before proceeding with the business functions
24% already have built their own in-house SaaS engineering stack / framework
76% would like to evaluate the pros and cons of buying a ready made framework vs. building their own

Challenging aspects of building a Multi-tenant SaaS product:

% of ISVs who consider this aspect as challenging

65% : customizing and configuring the product for each tenant (UI, data model extensions, business rules)
56% : security and access control policies that are unique to each tenant (data scoping, field level, page level)
40% : to support database scaling both horizontally and vertically
24% : tenant provisioning, product package and subscription management linked to access controls
11% : metering with links to usage limits and access controls
  9% : Audit trail (tenant wise, user wise)

Sample size : 55     Aug 2010:  
Online Survey among ISVs conducted by techcello using Google Forms

Benefits of Cloud Computing - User Perspective

Despite possible data security risks, cloud computing has some benefits that many organizations are certain to take advantage of. Let’s discuss about the advantages for each one (User, Service Provider, and Industry)

Benefits in User (Organization) Perspective:

Cost Effectiveness: With this model of deployment an organization can avail cost effective services.

Mobility: A user of an organization can access his information from anywhere.

Easy Upgrades: An organization can avail any new features or upgrades in faster time.

Flexibility: It allows much flexibility than traditional computing methods.

Easy Switch over: Having little expenditure involved in this model of computing, organization can easily switchover to other service provider for better service.

Allow IT team to shift focus: With this mode of computing, an organization doesn’t need to take care of any regular server maintenance issues. In turn they can concentrate on their innovation.

In coming post let us discuss the benefits in service provider perspective.

Usage Monitoring in Cloud Computing

To ensure adequate service levels and to avoid being overcharged for cloud services, there are tools to monitor and manage cloud usage. Public cloud applications and services like Sales Force, Amazon EC2/S3, Microsoft Windows Azure and others are now a critical part of computing infrastructure. For vital business services in public cloud environments, or spanning public clouds and data centers, a service provider should have a tool to provide a complete integrated view delivering the detailed quality of service metrics, alarms, usage of your monitoring environment and automation that allows to manage service levels and maintain up-time.

Growing demand for cloud infrastructure services (IaaS) in India

Latest trends shows the increasing infrastructure services boom in India, while all managed and co location data center providers started offering cloud infrastructure services and other companies seriously evaluating & acquiring all required hardware and software infrastructure to move into the cloud. The concept of "Pay as you go" & "pay as you use" is showing successful results in the market. In the other part of the world the companies like “Rack space” are generating good amount of money out of these services, Indian infrastructure providers are looking all possible ways to tap the Domestic and global markets.

Data centers named Ctrl S, ESDS and Net Magic started offering cloud services. In another case a largest Broadband services provider from India, Sify started offering cloud hosting in partnered with VMware virtualization platform.

Below mentioned is the software infrastructure for providing a complete suite of cloud hosting services with pre paid and post paid model billing and service delivery.

Virtualization Platform, Service Provisioning systems, Usage Monitoring tools, Usage Metering systems, Rating and Billing Platforms are the required software to offer complete cloud services suite.

Let us discuss about each platform in the coming posts.

India to lead world in cloud computing: Ballmer

Microsoft Corp sees India as the global hub for cloud computing, the concept of renting computing power that has taken the technology world by storm and in the words of the NYT, what Silicon Valley cannot seem to get its head out of.

“India will not only see a surge in cloud computing services but companies all over the world will look to India to support their transition to cloud computing,’’ Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said on Thursday.

The world’s biggest software maker is among a handful of companies betting big on cloud services, aiming to convince enterprises to give up building and managing data centres and switch to their computer capacity instead; the others being rivals such as Amazon, Google and AT&T as well as smaller firms like Rackspace and Terremark.

Microsoft believes India will move directly to the cloud, much like it bypassed the landline revolution that never happened and leapt to mobile phones, Mr Ballmer told a packed press meet. Mr Ballmer is in India to underline the importance of the company’s cloud services platform Azure, wherein people can use applications from email to payroll systems hosted online.

The transition that India will champion will seed 3 lakh jobs in five years, during which the business is estimated to grow to $70 billion, Microsoft said, quoting a study by Zinnov Management Consulting. Jobs will be generated in areas like cloud consulting, enabling software as a service, integrating offerings like Azure with IBM’s Blue Cloud or salesforce.com’s customer applications on cloud, and creating new applications.

For Indian businesses too, there is great potential, given that 30%, or $7 billion, of the global cloud computing work is to be offshored, said the Zinnov study.

Microsoft already has more than 600 customers for its cloud services, but wants a deeper head start over rivals after catcalls of playing catch-up in other tech fields have been growing louder by the day. Indeed, Mr Ballmer was speaking to reporters a day after Apple overtook his company as the world’s biggest technology firm in terms of market value, more than a decade after he took over its reins.

The company is, therefore, sparing no efforts in making its cloud computing push a success in India, a market that is “developing very nicely”, where “piracy is reducing and intellectual property protection is better than in China”. Mr Ballmer also noted that India is among the top five or six countries in terms of talent and market potential.

Microsoft said cloud is important in India as it is a catalyst for IT adoption. “We are successful at exporting IT services and talent. But when it comes to using technology domestically, we are quite poor,’’ said Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan.

There isn’t much use of computers and technology in schools, homes, government offices or by the more than 4 million small and medium businesses. More Info>>

Sify partners with VMware to deliver on-demand cloud solutions

Sify Technologies recently announced its partnership with VMware that will enable Sify to provide on-demand hosting (cloud) services to end-customers using the VMware vSphere 4 platform.

Sify has joined the global VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP), designed for service-providers who offer on-demand cloud services giving them the option to “rent” VMware software licenses on a monthly “pay as you go” basis. This model is aimed at helping Indian companies, both large and small, to safely tap computing capacity inside and outside their firewalls to help ensure quality of service for any application they want to run, internally or as a service.

P J Nath, Executive President, Enterprise Business, Sify, said, “This partnership will help us in making virtualized infrastructure available to a greater number of customers in a simplified way. For Sify to lead in the cloud service domain in India market, it was imperative to partner with a technology vendor who commands respect and has wider reach in secure virtualization initiatives, and VMware was our natural choice. Our partnership with VMware enables us to offer public, private and hybrid cloud to VMware customers for their Primary, Disaster Recovery (DR) or Business Continuity Program (BCP) proposition.”

The VSPP is a part of the VMware’s vCloud initiative which is designed to enable compatibility for all applications running in the cloud, whether on or off premise.

This partnership is aimed at helping Sify address the increasing demand for on-demand computing in India, which is one of the fastest growing cloud computing markets in the Asia Pacific region. Reference