Do you have to leverage “X as a Service” to be a SaaS provider?


I love the idea that a balance exists between ideology and practicality. Questions of ideology and practicality always arise when it comes to building software, building a business, and building a software business. SaaS is no exception.

Interestingly, I had two different discussions with people who were of the position that aspiring SaaS company’s should “put their money where their mouth is” and use cloud technologies exclusively to build out their SaaS offerings, stating that it was a form of hypocrisy to offer SaaS and not use Infrastructure as a Service or Platform as a Service.

The question I have is whether it is necessary to bind yourself to “XaaS” technologies in order to be a SaaS provider. To be honest, I think that such a “requirement” is absurd. No, you don’t need to use IaaS or PaaS or anything of that nature to be a SaaS provider at all, let alone a good one. Not using XaaS says nothing about convictions. I find this sort of fanatical idealism a put off, and it’s interesting to me that people in the tech space moving to SaaS fail to realize that ‘Service’ is only new and special in the context of software. Humans have been running service business for hundreds of years. Do you think that telephone companies, electric utilities, cable TV companies, etc. only use services to run their business? No, of course not. There are many good reasons and cases to use XaaS suppliers to support your own SaaS business (EC2, etc.) and in other cases, you may need/want to run your own infrastructure. Currently, there is no clear cut rule or guide forcing one way or the other. The fact of the matter is , you can be a GREAT SaaS provider and run in a co-located space, in your own datacenter, on EC2, or whatever else you deem appropriate. What matters is the quality of service and the quality of the software.

Do you agree with the statement that a SaaS provider needs to be using IaaS/PaaS to be taken seriously, or do you feel that it’s OK for a SaaS provider to leverage non “XaaS” approaches?

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December 10th, 2009
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Ben Kepes
Posted on:
December 10, 2009 at 7:51 pm

Sinclair - totally agree. There’s nothing I hate more than blind dogma. Those who berate cloudy people for not being 100% in the cloud do much to damage our nascent industry.
I blogged about it awhile ago - https://www.cloudave.com/link/installed-apps-for-saas-vendors - great to see you guys fight the ideology!

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Jim Donovan
Posted on:
December 10, 2009 at 8:12 pm

Absolutely right, Sinclair. Zealotry has no place in the decision; but no doubt the zealots themselves wouldn’t agree!!

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Sinclair Schuller
Posted on:
December 10, 2009 at 9:53 pm

Ben, great post - I hadn’t read it before, but glad I did now. Ideology for the sake of ideology never made sense to me.

Jim, fortunately for us, time will be on our side in the long term and will produce evidence to support our case;-)

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
Justin Pirie
Posted on:
December 11, 2009 at 7:59 am

Spot on Sinclair.

I do think though, if I were a startup today I would look to leverage PaaS specifically but it doesn’t make absolute sense to change or re-architect just because that is what the current trend is…

That said, Google Apps is pretty amazing compared to exchange!

Justin

Comment Number:
5
Written by:
Sameer Jejurkar
Posted on:
December 14, 2009 at 1:55 pm

Great post - couldn’t agree more. Just because you are a SaaS vendor who using IaaS/PaaS to build your service, it doesn’t mean that you are providing a better service. You could build your service using IaaS/PaaS and still mess it up.

Those who want to judge if a SaaS vendor is “putting their money where their mouth is” should perhaps look at other SaaS services they (i.e. vendor) are using - sales, accounting, office apps or perhaps even their own service for internal uses (akin to Google’s dogfooding program). That may be a better indicator of how much the vendor believes in the concept. That said, even if they use other SaaS services does not automatically mean that their own service is good/great.

Comment Number:
6
Written by:
Walter Adamson
Posted on:
December 15, 2009 at 9:30 pm

Agree. The issue of how a SaaS provider configures and sources their infrastructure is irrelevant to the quality of their SaaS offer, provided the infrastructure is aligned and architected to that offer. I think that the people you mention typify the group of people who think SaaS is about technology, they’re a hard nut to crack. Another point, and only a point of view - which will never be resolved - your post to me restates the case which I support which is that “cloud” can be part of SaaS but that SaaS is much bigger. The concepts of cloud as an infrastructure apply to SaaS but are a subset of SaaS.

Walter Adamson @g2m
http://xeesm.com./walter

Comment Number:
7
Written by:
Chintan
Posted on:
December 17, 2009 at 6:17 am

Agree that the SaaS providers need not do it just for the sake of ideology but as a complete eco-system it would surely help if the cost structures are of similar nature. Having a high capex in dedicated or co-located servers might not make sense in the initial phases of SaaS offering.