Implementation of SaaS program application Five

SaaS and cloud-based applications are richer than ever, but it's not that some applications migrate to the cloud for good ROI. SaaS spreads quickly in business units and departments, which typically do not require it help and strategic guidance to ensure that functionality is not duplicated or is not in conflict with other tools of the company.

SaaS and cloud-based applications are richer than ever, but it's not that some applications migrate to the cloud for good ROI. Here are five tips to help you think about it strategies and help you analyze whether these applications are suitable for migrating to the cloud.

To address this issue, we interviewed Matson Navigation, chief executive of Peter Weis and Sand Hill consultancy, the Cloud Research department manager Kamesh Pemmaraju.

Here are some steps to consider before migrating from a traditional application to a web-based application.

1. Consider why you need SaaS

Weis was hired to transform the IT infrastructure of Matson in 2003, so part of its mission is to design an infrastructure and develop a strategy to coordinate the relationship between SaaS applications and internal applications.

The March Sand Hill survey of 500 high-level it and business managers shows that the main reason for US companies ' interest in cloud computing is business agility, not because it can save costs. 49% of respondents make business flexibility their most important goal. 46% of respondents make cost-effectiveness their most important goal. The third goal is to release IT resources to focus and innovate, with less than half the approval rating: 22%.

SaaS spreads quickly in business units and departments, which typically do not require it help and strategic guidance to ensure that functionality is not duplicated or is not in conflict with other tools of the company.

Pemmaraju says that people tend to use SaaS as a technology option, but that's not the case. SaaS should be a business option and allow access to technology so that business needs can be addressed in real time. If you just think of it as a technology, you have to think about how to promote your business goals.

2. Consideration of architectural issues

Before deciding to sign the SaaS protocol and reduce internal applications, Weis and its employees spend a year counting the company's existing systems and building a reference platform that can provide middleware and application servers to connect new systems and existing systems.

Weis says our goal is that all of our applications can run on the target IT platform based on a distributed architecture, J2E based on middleware and application servers. The time of the year was mainly used to build the foundation, but also to adjust the original organizational structure. We hired the technicians we needed, set up the quality Assurance group, the inspection team. These are not in the previous organization.

In the long run, says West, such a prudent architectural plan is useful for any enterprise, although it becomes increasingly unnecessary when SaaS vendors start offering more ways to consolidate SaaS and legacy applications, and with other SaaS integrations.

Salesforce.com's business has half is done through APIs, which means that software is connected through programming and other systems.

SaaS vendors like Salesforce have built up a lot of good integration into their applications. Like Boomi and the recently acquired IBM Castlron These third parties can also implement data synchronization between the preset program and the SaaS application.

Third-party integrators such as Appirio, Modelmetrics and Bluewolf can also provide a consolidation set for SaaS applications.

3. Real-time inventory and eliminate redundant applications

Companies with important IT infrastructures rarely have full control over all the applications they run. Every consultant has a horrible experience.

West's experience is this: Each company has three departments, one is 26 individual ERP system, mostly from the acquisition, many are merged, but the software is not. Pemmaraju, the CIO of the world's top 500 companies, admits that there are about 15,000 to 20,000 applications and that they don't know if they have a connection.

The cost of maintaining reusable applications is high. These problems are very common and difficult to solve.

Pemmaraju estimates that most business applications include critical data or functionality that remains within the firewall. The rest is highly versatile or commercialized so that it can be transferred to the outside or merged into a small brand merchant.

However, Weis says this is the first step in matching internal applications and cloud-based applications. Background Office applications are a good candidate for SaaS, which includes: financial, human resources, and accounting applications.

However, these may not meet the specific requirements.

Weis says there are 30 major carriers in the shipping sector, which is not a large enough market to develop solid enough tonnage products. So like the core reservation system and the reservation system, these are absolutely custom generated files, bills of lading, business rules, and requirements are very specific.

4. Carefully check the supplier's indicators

In the SaaS relationship, Weis says, it is important to see whether the supplier's economic base is solid, well-managed, safe to use, and has a well-functioning data center. Therefore, it is important to verify the supplier's financial position and capabilities in a variety of ways. However, Pemmaraju says more research is needed to choose the right SaaS provider.

SMEs or individual departments may rely on Boomi or castlron for integration. More large projects require SaaS vendors to provide more appropriate tools for close integration with existing applications.

Pemmaraju said that once I had a client who said that if a SaaS company could not provide a network service framework, I would not work with him. Being able to manage a large number of SaaS applications from a single management console is a lot of business. This also includes identity management. If you have to create or change user information for each management task to a different console, this information cannot be associated in all places when someone leaves the company.

In terms of cloud computing, scale is a problem, and if there is no common place to manage them, it will be difficult to maintain.

5. More appropriate cost

Pemmaraju says the company's out-of-the-box software looks expensive because customers need to prepay large sums of money and pay large sums in the first three years of use. After that, the customer's economic costs will be assessed in the way they are paid. This also means that depending on the aging software, the potential benefits will be missed in the new version.

SaaS applications look cheap because their cost of use is much lower than acquisition costs, and they can quickly provide useful functionality, faster than the IT specification they bring, and the ability to build and test enterprise Out-of-the-way applications.

However, Pemmaraju also said that without a coherent strategy and a successful standard setting, it would be impossible to know whether SaaS programs would produce real value.

Weis says that without good integration tools and the ability to use them, customers must replicate, test, deploy, and manage each application, rather than simplifying them with better process and management integration.

This is the real challenge for SaaS, says Weis. He must make sure that the platform that the application runs on is well deployed and can easily be contacted. Ultimately, many SaaS is the real problem of reducing clutter, improving efficiency, and being able to better handle business.