![]() ![]() The selections below are intended to give a flavour of the available variety rather than make any claim to comprehensiveness.īusiness Intelligence (BI) and Analytics software marshals disparate data on past and present business performance, delivers customisable reports and dashboards, and supports informed decision-making for the future. There is now a multitude of SaaS providers, covering all major categories of business software. Gartner's research also highlighted regional differences in the most prevalent software categories deployed via the SaaS model: expense management, financials, email and office suites, and web conferencing in North America financials and accounting, ERP, office suites, email and CRM in Asia/Pacific CRM and groupware in Japan email, accounting, sales force automation and customer service, and expense management in Latin America. Other regions failed to break the $1bn barrier: Asia/Pacific ($934.1 million), Japan ($495.2m), Latin America ($419.7m) and Eastern Europe ($169.4m). Regional SaaS revenue forecasts for 2012 were headed by North America with $9.1bn, followed by Western Europe with $3.2bn. This healthy growth rate is set to continue, according to the research company, which predicts a $22.1bn SaaS market in 2015. In March last year, Gartner forecast that worldwide SaaS revenue would reach $14.5 billion in 2012 - a 17.9 percent increase over 2011's $12.5bn. If it's not possible to handle the relevant APIs and data structures in-house, there's a relatively new breed of Integration-as-a-Service products available, including Boomi (a Dell-owned company), CloudSwitch and Informatica. Integration Businesses that adopt multiple SaaS applications, or wish to connect hosted software with existing on-premise apps, face the problem of software integration. What happens to your data and your carefully orchestrated business processes if your service provider goes under - or if you need to change your SaaS vendor for some other reason? When choosing a SaaS vendor, you'd be wise to ensure you avoid lock-in by preparing an exit strategy. In the meantime, application performance management tools can help businesses and service providers keep tabs on how their apps are running.ĭata mobility The SaaS market is awash with startups, and some will inevitably fail. Obviously some tasks will be better suited than others to the SaaS model - at least until internet connection speed is no longer an issue. Performance A browser-based application hosted in a remote datacenter and accessed via an internet connection is likely to cause worries about performance when compared to software running on a local machine or over the company LAN. Alternatively, you can investigate a Compliance-as-a-Service product such as that from Niu Solutions. You'll need to determine which regulations apply to your business, ask the right questions of your SaaS vendor and implement a solution to address any failings. Tools such as Compuware's Outage Analyzer and Is It Down Right Now? let you monitor ongoing cloud outages.Ĭompliance When your business data resides in a service provider's datacenter, ensuring that you comply with the relevant government data-protection regulations can be a problem. You'll need to scrutinise your service provider's SLA (Service Level Agreement) and historical performance very carefully before outsourcing mission-critical applications to the public cloud. Any downtime is irritating, but a lengthy outage of a mission-critical app could prove disastrous. Outages Despite cloud providers' best-laid plans, outages do happen, with causes ranging from acts of God to human error and many points in between. And if your company uses multiple cloud services, be aware that deprovisioning an ex-employee can become a security headache. Security The number-one concern for businesses considering SaaS is often security: if sensitive company data and business processes are to be entrusted to a third-party service provider, then issues such as identity and access management - particularly from mobile devices - need to be addressed. Of course, there are also potential pitfalls associated with SaaS, which is why the world hasn't yet gone completely cloud-software-crazy. SaaS application delivery involves a chain of technology links, any of which can introduce delays or outages that impair the user experience and reduce productivity (Image source: Compuware).
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