Simple Analysis of Software Application of SAAS in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

This is a service model suitable for software applications of small and medium-sized enterprises.
Definition: software as a service
Advantages: Reduced development/maintenance costs; paid mode.
Disadvantage: data security.
Important auxiliary solution: Smart Clients.

SAAS is short for software-as-a-service (software as a service). With the development of Internet technology and the maturity of application software, A completely innovative software application model that has emerged since the 21st century. It has similar meanings to on-demand software, the Application Service Provider (ASP), and hosted software. It provides software through the Internet. Vendors deploy application software on their own servers. Customers can meet their actual needs, you can purchase required application software services from a vendor over the Internet, pay the vendor for the services you have ordered, and obtain the services provided by the vendor over the Internet. Instead of buying software, you can rent web-based software from your provider to manage your business activities. You do not need to maintain the software. The service providers are solely responsible for managing and maintaining the software, when providing Internet applications to customers, software vendors also provide offline software operations and local data storage so that users can use the software and services they order anytime and anywhere. For many small enterprises, SAAS is the best way to adopt advanced technologies. It eliminates the need for enterprises to purchase, build, and maintain infrastructure and applications.ProgramRequired

Small and medium-sized enterprises do not have much budget for software applications. It is not easy to develop from scratch. First, because the development cycle is long, and second, because the customer is difficult to afford high development costs (especially the first phase ). In addition, hardware maintenance costs are also high. Many small and medium enterprises need to maintain their own database servers, Web servers... and people who know these technologies inside the enterprise can only increase their indifferent expenses and are not secure.
SAAS can alleviate this problem to some extent: not only does software maintenance become centralized, but even hardware maintenance become concentrated. In this way, enterprises do not have to allocate additional energy to maintain the IT department.
For software companies, there are many aspects of maintenance, and the other is that during the demonstration, you can quickly come up with a demo and perform the demo on the Internet.
In terms of billing, the monthly billing model can be used (because continuous information services are provided, rather than one-time software and hardware) to ensure stable income of software companies, on the other hand, it solves the pressure on enterprises to pay for the first phase.

However, the disadvantages are also obvious: it is not safe to put sensitive data on the public-maintained network for customers. These data is very important for enterprises, and these data/servers are all in the hands of software service providers, which is hard for them to accept psychologically. Therefore, in actual applications, sensitive databases must be stored on enterprise-hosted servers or locally.
However, this option is difficult to implement. Because SAAS is designed for centralized management.

Due to network restrictions (slow network speed or connection failure), many actual operations are too dependent on this unstable media. Therefore, smart clients are very important.
For example, if the customer is inputting transaction data but the network is suddenly disconnected, will the enterprise stop the business and wait for the Network to improve? Obviously, no. Software is a tool, not a barrier.
In this case, you can use the Smart Client: local use of the Windows interface; local cache of data; timely synchronization of data on the server.
The window interface can reduce the network speed limit (if a Web page is opened for 1 minute, the customer is afraid to use it ); local data cache can solve the problem of network instability/Data Storage disconnection (customers do not need to worry that network Disconnection will affect their normal business operations); Data Synchronization is required, you can choose to synchronize when the traffic volume is small, and try to achieve a similar "real-time" effect.

In short, it seems that SAAS is still the best solution, although not perfect.

This is another friend's observation report:
Http://www.cnblogs.com/fjwuyongzhi/archive/2007/06/13/782274.html

Smart Client:
Http://www.cnblogs.com/dlwang2002/archive/2005/04/23/207974.html