SaaS

Too often in the tech industry, the pundits and press try to create needless controversy about an exciting new innovation by declaring that adoption is an either/or proposition and polarizing the marketplace. These polemics can be unfair and a disservice to corporate decision-makers trying to sort out the myths and realities of the over-hyped industry trend. Especially because enterprises and ISVs alike generally require a mix of ‘on-demand’ and on-premise resources to achieve their corporate objectives.

Can your business survive a website failure? The answer varies based on the criticality of your website to overall business operations. Walk into an understaffed brick and mortal establishment with a rusty, hard-to-open door, cracked windows and a faulty cash register — for most, the condition of the store would be enough to walk out without even checking out the products and services. If your business runs on the web, you can suffer the same loss of confidence with slow performance, rampant downtime and security holes.

Consistency in a SaaS environment is imperative. It makes it makes supporting those environments easier for both Rackspace and for our customers.

After years of working with SaaS customers, I hear every day about horror stories and challenges related to scaling. Simply put: scaling can be a headache. SaaS applications thrive – or die – on the performance of their infrastructure and as you grow you’ll have no choice but to face the scaling dilemma. How you scale your application to distribute traffic and run your code can mean the difference between an instant response for users or users waiting for your app to respond or update.

One of the most important decisions pertaining to developing and delivering Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions is choosing the right Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) architecture. Making the right architectural choice is essential because it will influence the scalability, flexibility and economic viability of the SaaS vendor’s solutions.

It’s been another action-packed week here at Rackspace. And there’s a lot more to come. In case you missed anything, here’s a handy recap of some of the week’s biggest stories.

Moving your legacy application to an on-demand, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription model has never been easier, but it is still isn’t simple. In fact, with the proliferation of cloud alternatives the options have become even more confusing. And, if you make the wrong choices it could adversely affect your SaaS solution performance, hurt your company reputation and make it even more difficult to succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

A combination of macro-market forces is driving companies of all sizes to adopt Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions to better support their employees, serve their customers and coordinate with their business partners. These forces are also attracting a proliferation of players and creating intense competition which makes it increasingly important for SaaS vendors to focus on their core competency – creating clearly differentiated software solutions – rather than deal with the complexities of managing their own service delivery infrastructures in a highly volatile marketplace.