Darren Wesemann Blog

I find it fascinating to watch the current battles between application platforms for the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) paradigm.  I can’t help imagining what the application delivery landscape will look like in 10 years. 

Clearly, SaaS abstracts a number of things away, such as the Operating System (no longer visible, because in a SaaS environment exposes only the service, not the stack underneath), whereas traditional applications make you not only aware of what Operating System is, but the hardware and the application server (expanding from both ends of the OS) are also important to be made aware of for deployment, management and integration purposes.  Abstraction simplifies things, so it’s save to predict more abstraction, more simplification.

Another safe bet is that the platforms upon which SaaS applications are delivered will converge (makes sense, early stage domains typically see lots of convergence).  At some point developers of SaaS-delivered applications should expect to be building from a common foundation, and should be able to be deriving and consuming from common libraries of services.

Although it’s a bit early to predict what framework(s) and/or what provider(s) will win the current SaaS platform battles, it’s interesting to ponder the various players and approaches.  They are:

Pure SaaS plays: these are providers claiming that everything should run in the cloud.  Such as Force.com (Salesforce.com’s platform as a service).  Google has entered the cloud arena as well as long-time providers of cloud compute cycles like Amazon.

Hybrid SaaS/On-premise plays: these are guys providing a solution embracing cloud computing and site-installed applications.  Microsoft endorses this approach, with its Software+Services campaign.  SunGard as well fits into this camp, because Infinity supports service access methods (on-demand and download/install/run scenarios). 

Unlike the pure SaaS method, the hybrid approach deals with the fact that there is usually something local.  In the case of SunGard (who provides software solutions to the Financial Services sector) there is ALWAYS something to integrate with (other applications, data, processes, etc).  Extending and integrating is not going away, therefore the outlook seams to lead me to believe the hybrid approach will be with us long-term, as it’s the only practical method, whereas the pure-SaaS play ignores too many real-world tactics, where the “rubber meets the road”.

Another topic that’s interesting to ponder regarding the future is how services themselves will evolve.  It appears that more and more of the services we rely on are taking up residence outside the enterprise.  If this trend continues, we could cross the line where the majority of what we rely on is serviced somewhere else (companies that outsource heavily can already claim that they are more dependent upon externally executed services than in-house ones).  I guess this is what some refer to as Universal SOA, which seems to be a safe bet for the future, because enterprises are continually becoming more and more comfortable with depending upon external services.