SaaS Development

Traditionally, software providers have delivered software solutions through installing them on client computers and networks. In the recent times, however, clients have been requesting for Software as a Service for the more reasonable cost it offers and the lesser complex process involved in internally running the system.

Essentially, SaaS providers should recognize the intricacies involved in on-demand offerings, as well as the challenges in the transitioning of dedicated applications into a SaaS platform — as operated by the IT organization of the client — before starting component selection and infrastructure design.

A high-level SaaS platform requires certain technical standards. For large business enterprises, these requirements that are more focused on the platform over the solution or the application.

1. The platform must be able to meet certain technical requirements, namely availability, security, reliability and standards, among others, which are supported by most SaaS solutions.

2. The platform should be decoupled into three layers – portal or User Interaction, domain or data and business logic — because these generally not supported SaaS providers.  With respect to User Interaction, the SaaS providers host and provide only the presentation aspect, while the data and business logic are stored in some other areas.
Pointing to a specific case, for instance, SalesForce.com hosts User Interaction; SAP
Business By Design hosts Business Logic; and Oracle hosts the Data.

3. Tools for standard development should ideally be used, such as the Eclipses tool. Meanwhile, the code may require on-site deployment and SaaS platform. In recent cases, there is a slim possibility of reused code between in-house developments being allowed. It is recommended that one identical code will be deployed on the on-premise infrastructure and the SaaS platform.

4. In order to meet the needs large enterprises, data services that are on real-time basis and are unrestricted are a major factor. To do this, user interaction should be supported by multi-channels, which most providers currently offer.

5. Standard tools that have been developed must be deployed on in-house infrastructure or SaaS. These standard tools are supported by top SaaS vendors for PHP, Ruby or Perl, but only a few support .Net or Java, Flex, AJAX and the like.

6. Business Logic that is based on XPDL and BPEL are not supported by most of the major vendors. These SaaS vendors, however, support the native code standards. Additionally, SaaS developers may use their online or graphical developer tools in order to present a business process or logic model. The code, however, cannot be deployed within the business enterprise.

7. The facility to decouple the business policies and rules from the process, as supported by the develop-custom code, can be expected to mature in the succeeding two years, A certain “Business Rules“ engine, which include ILog and Drools, are deployable within an enterprise.

8. The data or Domain Layer is the standard data grid which supports distributed data. This is also inclusive of the “meta-data” which drives the solution in its entirety. The developer must also be capable of modelling any composite or simple object, for deployment on the grid thereafter. When based on operations or CRUD, the decoupled data layer performs the operation on the proper data source.

9. The ability for support to alerts and events in order trigger certain actions, or the Event-Driven Architecture support may also function as a “business state machine”. Providing performance on a real-time basis is a key requirement for next generation business solution – which is offered by Coghead and SalesForce. The business solutions that these providers offer are on a transactional level and may have to be extended and capacitate them to provide an almost real-time performance. Notably, SaaS providers should ideally leverage SaaS tools such as Tangosol or Oracle Coherence, Java Space, SAP In-memory database, GigaSpaces. EII tools including Composite, AquaLogic DSP and Metamatrix will give the SaaS providers an edge, as to provide foundation to the layers.

Software analysts predict that large business enterprises will start adopting certain SaaS solutions along with IT groups to primarily focus on the integration of the enterprise. It is expected that by then, a standards-based platform that needs a single development tool will be achieved. Such will offer IT organizations the choice to deploy the solution either on the SaaS providers’ platform or within an enterprise. To this end, analysts conclude that perhaps, enterprises actually need a SooS – a Services-Oriented Operation System.