SaaS Blogs

When formulating the architectural foundation for a SaaS application, ISVs will inevitably encounter the age old build vs. buy decision.  SaaS enablement is hot right now, giving vendors a plethora of options on the buy side. 

Nick Carr has an interesting argument in support of the buy scenario - specifically urging vendors to buy into a horizontally aligned platform serving multiple vendor-instigated verticals because issues arising with subscriber usage and economies of scale.  The example Nick gives is Intuit’s TurboTax online, explaining how the service from this system ground to a snail’s pace because of the mad rush of Americans filing taxes earlier this week. 

A similar example would be the usage peaks that a CRM application will experience at the end of each quarter as sales are tied up at a frenzied pace.

As an ISV, if you need to provide high availability service but that service is prone to suffer unusual high peak times, having ‘anticipatory’ hardware lying in wait can be quite cost prohibitive.  So what’s the solution?  As in most cases, aggregation of resources leads to economies of scale.  Platforms provide that aggregation, normalizing the usage spikes across many vertically-aligned vendor applications.  As Nick puts it, the only way to do this is by sharing the resources with other companies that also need high availability service but whose peak times are different than yours.  It is simply a matter of economies of scale, and platforms are able to achieve these economies through mass aggregation of requirements and management of resources.

Platforms like Apex and SaaSGrid aggregate infrastructure requirements, and taking the solution a step further by providing guarantees of service at any point in time without ISVs explicitly having to build out an infrastructure or request a larger slice of the computing pie during high volume times (unlike an MSP scenario).