The Emerging Business team here at Microsoft have been kicking around the various business uses of Software as a Service applications. We’re pretty much in agreement on the prevailing business model itself, after all it’s not new (anyone remember the timesharing days?). We also agree that non-critical business apps can safely live in the cloud. But how far into mission-critical systems can SaaS be used and still allow an IT manager to sleep at night? Financial transactions? MRP systems? Application Integration?
Integration? At first glance it seems a risky proposition. After all, a company’s integration engine usually touches ALL critical systems and has access to virtually every part of the business. But when you break it down into its basic components the comfort factor goes way back up. Networking, data format mediation, process control, reporting: As far as the application at the end of the pipe is concerned, the data is coming out of some sort of cloud anyway. The security principles applied behind the firewall can now be matched by those applied outside of the firewall. So why not application integration offered as a service?
Industry veteran Dave Linthicum has figured this out, and his company Bridgewerx is doing this today. He’s turned traditional integration and business process software into a single instance, multi-tenant service that provides performance and uptimes that exceed Enterprise expectations and won’t cause IT managers to get those dreaded middle-of-the-night outage calls. Read more about it here.
SaaS is rapidly blurring the lines between what’s inside and outside your corporate computing boundaries. It’s not unusual to see an IT architecture diagram showing a hosted integration provider connecting a hosted sales force automation service to an in-house ERP package. So how deep can SaaS go? As long as service levels and security are up to in-house standards, I can’t think of a single system that won’t have a SaaS option.
