SaaS, Cloud – The Big Picture

SaaS Maturity Levels

Source: Forrester 2008

Foundations of SaaS Levels

configurability

multi-tenant

efficiency,

scalability

SaaS Maturity Levels

Level 0

• Outsourcing is not SaaS. In outsourcing, a service provider operates a major application or a unique application landscape for a large enterprise customer. As the outsourcing company can't leverage this application for a second customer, outsourcing does not qualify as SaaS.

Level 1

• Manual ASP business models target midsize companies. At level 1, a hosting provider runs packaged applications like SAP's ERP 6.0, which require significant IT skills, for multiple midsize enterprises. Usually, each client has a dedicated server running its instance of the application and is able to customize the installation in the same way as self-hosted applications.

Level 2

• Level 2: Industrial ASPs cut the operating costs of packaged applications to a minimum. At level 2, an ASP uses sophisticated IT management software to provide identical software packages with customer-specific configurations to many SMB customers. However, the software package is still the same software that was originally created for self-hosted deployment.

SaaS Maturity Levels

Level 3

• Level 3: Single-app SaaS is an alternative to traditional packaged applications. At level 3, software vendors create new generations of business applications that have SaaS capabilities built in. Web-based user interface (UI) concepts and the ability to serve a huge number of tenants with one, scaleable infrastructure are typical characteristics. Customization is restricted to configuration. Single-app SaaS adoption thus focuses on SMBs. Salesforce.com's CRM application initially entered the market at this level.

Level 4

• Business-domain SaaS provides all the applications for an entire business domain. At level 4, an advanced SaaS vendor provides not only a well-defined business application but also a platform for additional business logic. This complements the original single application of the previous level with third-party packaged SaaS solutions and even custom extensions. The model even satisfies the requirements of large enterprises, which can migrate a complete business domain like "customer care" toward SaaS.

Level 5

• Dynamic Business Apps-as-a-service is the visionary target. Forrester's Dynamic Business Application imperative embraces a new paradigm of application development: "design for people, build for change." At level 5, advanced SaaS vendors coming from level 4 will provide a comprehensive application and integration platform on demand, which they will prepopulate with business applications or business services. They can compose tenant-specific and even user-specific business applications on various levels. The resulting process agility will attract everyone, including large enterprise customers.

Features of SaaS Architecture

SaaS Architectu

re Features

Single Instance

Multi Tenancy Product

Management Suite

Billing and Metering

Application Lifecyle

Management

Subscription

Management

Provisioning

User and Role

Systems

End User Self

Service Interface

Service Catalog

Peer-To-Peer

Message Bus

Contextual Logging

Advantage Multi-Instance Efficiency gains — Virtualization allows to deliver efficiencies much closer to

multi tenancy by allowing for rapid and even automated creation of complete and identical new Virtual environments, full backups/snapshots of environments, easy upgrades across multiple environments, automated load balancing, etc.

Avoiding downsides, achieving delivery advantages — clients have a need for system changes to match key cycles — like their pay for

performance cycles. As a result, there is a demand for more tightly controlled, client-unique system changes.

concerns over: ▪ (a) security and inappropriate data access, ▪ (b) impact of other clients on their system performance, ▪ (c) inability to establish and pay for their own, higher service levels (common

among large companies), ▪ (d) being forced into an upgrade, ▪ (e) inability to support the level of client specific configurations and even

customizations as necessary, ▪ (f) inability to obtain client level user acceptance testing, ▪ (g) inability to determine the precise production/go live dates for the system.

Cloud Services Building Blocks

Cloud Services

IaaS

PaaS

SaaS

TCO Components - Traditional Vs SaaS

TCO Components Traditional SaaS

Cost of Application

Cost of Database

Cost of Server

Cost of PCs

Cost of Peripherals

Cost of Implementation

Cost of AMC

Cost of subscription

Key Costs of Cloud Apps

Upfront Costs Recurring / Annual Costs

Implementation Subscription

Single Sign-on Configuration Change Management

Third party process consulting Testing and certification

Third party content development End User support and administration

Competency Development Integration

External Content Training

Source: Forrester Research Inc.

THE DISRUPTIVE APPROACH

Health Cloud Offerings – Level 4

HIS Suite FO BO Patient Portal Kiosk Mobile Health

EnablesMulti-Channel Delivery

Health Cloud Offerings – Level 5

HIS (FO & BO) SRL ePACS ePharm Mobile Health eMail Servers eHRMS (e.g. mPower/ Adrenalin) IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) Content Management Service Desk Management