Tasos Christidis

SaaS is not a brand new idea. It used to be called “ASP – Application Service Provisioning”. It didn’t work out very well back in the 90’s and 00’s, but now it’s back. There’s no doubt about that. Neither Outsourcing is a new idea. It has been going on for quite some time now. In this post I am going to explore what can happen when these two services are mixed . What business opportunities can be born for both the outsourcer and the SaaS provider, but most of all what are the benefits that the end-customer will enjoy. First, let’s try to answer the basic question: Why do we need to mix these two services? The answer is that outsourcing will surely need some kind of “tool” to deliver what it is promising. And on the flipside, a SaaS provider tends to be somewhat “technical”. They cannot always address the real business issues of the potential client. And they surely cannot offer anything more than their software and maybe some consulting and best practices on the usage of this softwa...

In this post I will try to explore the challenges that one will face when they try to mix or attach Business intelligence (BI) tools in their SaaS offering. In the traditional software delivery method, you had your database installed on an owned server. You just had to give access to users and designers (through their BI desktops) to access these data. They could query and download data (given certain permissions, of course, but this is another story). In a SaaS application, the database no longer resides in your premises. If we are talking about a private cloud, then, yes, between your desktop and the database there is the internet (“wild” internet or VPN). Your BI application should be able to access a remote database server through TCPIP (which is obviously not a problem for modern applications). But, what if you are a user of public cloud – multi-tenant system? Let’s see some points of consideration: True multitenant systems comprise of one database instance and one application ins...