BLOG: Greg Gianforte, CEO, RightNow Technologies

Mission-critical SaaS in Large Enterprises

31 May 2006 - Today we are seeing a tectonic shift in the way enterprises consume enterprise applications software. Software as a Service (SaaS), also known as on demand, is rapidly eroding traditional software models as companies discover its advantages. SaaS drives 5x faster time-to-benefit, an 80% reduction in total cost of ownership and a more reliable and scalable solution.
Most people have associated the SaaS trend with small and medium sized businesses, yet there is a growing trend for large multi-nationals to also adopt SaaS applications for global, mission critical deployments. It seems the fast time to benefit and reduced operating costs are just as desirable to these large enterprises.

A £1bn plus enterprise recently replaced a failed on-premise Siebel deployment for 1,650 contact centre seats with an SaaS solution in just 45 days. The company said at the launch that the SaaS vendor had done more for them in 45 days than Siebel had done in 2 ½ years. Plus the new system reduced the number of customer enquiries that required human interaction by 46% thereby significantly reducing the company’s costs to deliver exceptional service to their customers.

It is hard to ignore such tangible business results.
Possibly more interesting, however, are the underlying technology and business changes that have occurred to enable this dramatic expansion in capabilities for the SaaS world into large enterprises. Let’s examine them.

Multi-tenant and Multi-version Hosting

Early SaaS firms, and ones serving small and medium sized businesses, can upgrade all their customers at the same time, however, this is impossible for mission critical appliciatons in larger enterprises. Larger firms have many interdependencies with integrations, staff training, compliance issues and others. Throwing a "Frankenstein switch" to do an upgrade might be possible for non-mission critical applications, but not for mission critical ones.
New capabilities have emerged that allow a SaaS customer to control when and if a system upgrade occurs. Look for such capabilities if you are deploying a mission critical application.

High Reliability Hosting

Mission critical applications must be up and running. Downtime is death. Advanced hosting facilities for mission critical hosting must include:

• Redundancy at each architecture layer
  
  • routers, web servers, application servers, database servers
  
  
• Geographic redundancy
  
  • multiple redundant data centres
  
  
• Defined disaster recovery plans
  
• Minimal off-hours scheduled maintenance windows
  
  • Off-hours in SanFrancisco is not off-hours in London
  
  
• Historical performance in excess of 99.98%
  
• Real-time site specific performance diagnostics
  
• Clearly defined and responsive 24x7 escalations procedures

Contracting Choice

Many SaaS firms treat customers the way Henry Ford treated his customers; "Any colour you want as long as it is black." Larger firms require choice in how they purchase SaaS applications. Some prefer to pay per month, others prefer to use capital funds to lock in long term pricing. Make sure your vendor offers these choices.

SaaS is the future of enterprise software delivery because it provides a reliable, flexible and cost effective alternative to on premise. However, not all SaaS vendors are ready to serve the needs of large enterprises. Be sure you do your investigation, before committing to a firm that will leave you disappointed.

Greg Gianforte
CEO, RightNow Technologies
www.rightnow.com
greg.gianforte@rightnow.com

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