Send Cloud Enterprise Cloud service platform to solve traditional it delivery mode, help enterprise release productivity

Source: Internet
Author: User
Keywords Cloud

The traditional It delivery model has many problems, whether from the delivery cycle or from planning to experience, there are a lot of difficult to determine the factors, many times because of some subjective or objective reasons cause project lag or miscarriage. Today to recommend the SaaS Pioneer Enterprise called Cloud technology, founder Shipeixin is to see the current enterprise IT delivery pain point, in September 13 began to build the first fully automatic and full self-service enterprise cloud service platform. It can be thought of as "a platform for subversion of existing enterprise IT delivery models, a community of application experience and software learning, and a world of DIY applications for professional IT personnel." "This is the founder of Dr. Shipeixin's positioning of the cloud, in the cloud platform, rookie can experience the" to Jane "one-click Application Deployment (Dead Simple), while the big players can be flexible customization, on demand to build the business system.

Cloud Enterprise Cloud Service Platform is a platform of PAAs platform +saas Marketplace built on the IaaS public cloud. It overturns the traditional, cumbersome and lengthy delivery model for enterprise IT systems, allowing users to quickly find different kinds of enterprise applications, offering the same experience as a dealer's shopping, where users simply need to configure a few parameters to submit orders, In 5-10 minutes, you can get a set of IT systems that include multiple enterprise applications and a range of cloud resources (servers, networks, storage, and so on), and provide patterns for on-demand use. Users do not have to wait for the lengthy hardware resource purchase and application process, cumbersome hardware and software configuration process, as well as endless follow-up operations, you can quickly use a variety of commercial applications, the total elimination of the enterprise's IT investment concerns, the it to the business support capacity into a service model to help enterprises release productivity , rapid business transformation to cope with more change and faster business needs.

Deploy it applications, just like Jingdong shopping

In Dr Shipeixin's view, the traditional system integration of the interests of the chain is being broken, from both inside and outside the environment, the Enterprise procurement cloud Services has been a solid foundation. It is in such a large background, cloud technology launched a timely enterprise cloud store services, the next set of lines into online integration, variable product delivery for service delivery. The goal is to create a new model of cloud integration, subversion of traditional it delivery ecosystem. Small enterprises can purchase, install, use, a key to deploy a complete enterprise IT resources, large and medium-sized enterprises online testing, experience, evaluation after the end of "cloning" to the offline production environment.

CSDN: First introduce yourself and send cloud technology, the current focus of your attention?

Shipeixin: I am the 03 graduate of Beijing University of Posts and telecommunications, signal and information processing professional. After graduating, went to a router company, and then 06 came to Hamber technology. In the course of many years of talking to a lot of customers about cloud computing, we found that the demand for large and medium sized customers was different. Large customers He will have a more specific project requirements, such as I build a cloud computing data center, do server virtualization, may experience a long time, six months, a year, even two years of time. But for small and medium-sized customers, he just wants to be able to quickly use some of the technology features of the cloud, such as some flexibility to expand the advantages, there are some advantages of business flexibility. But he can't afford a longer delivery cycle, or a higher delivery cost. So after we came out, we were thinking about doing something.

I founded the cloud in September 13, on the one hand I continued some of the work I have done before to help clients build some private cloud delivery, mainly for some large customers to provide technical solutions. Includes early-stage consulting planning, medium-term programme design, including review guidance, and then participate in some customer implementation deliverables. This is mainly for private cloud customers to come and do this private cloud deployment. At the same time, I said that for some small and medium-sized customers, in fact, these small and medium customers are very clear, it is required to apply some of the characteristics of the cloud, such as flexibility, low cost, high efficiency characteristics. But it has no way to get too much cost to deliver cloud computing data centers. Then I was wondering if we could get through the public cloud, some of the products already on the public cloud line, we can do some online integration, through the public cloud resources, to give customers a set of such as OA system, such as delivery of IT systems, such as the delivery of a set of what network disk such a system. The hope is to use a platform such as Aliyun and Ucloud in the cloud to make this delivery. When we were planning to do these things, we evaluated a lot of public clouds, including Aliyun, Ucloud, Jin Shanyun, until we finally found Qingyun.

From February 14 onwards, we began to plan, can be built on the Tsing Qingyun such a similar enterprise application store such a platform, that is, we will put a lot of third-party applications, including Microsoft, Ufida, Kingdee, and all the familiar application up. The user only needs to be able to select the application that he is interested in on this platform, do some basic parameter configuration, this parameter configuration includes some application parameter configuration, including some parameter configuration of network environment, including some parameter configuration of bandwidth. He can submit orders, and then like shopping in Jingdong, put a number of applications into the shopping cart, choose to do the appropriate configuration, submit orders, our system will automatically help him complete a series of work.

This work is done primarily through APIs. The API of Qingyun is very open, you can do anything on it platform through API. For example, we have just mentioned that after creating an order, it may take the initiative to launch some API request, on the cloud up to apply for an IP, to apply for a router, create a network segment, and then for different machines to create different virtual machines, so that different applications to create different virtual machines. We then log on to the virtual machine to install the appropriate software. After loading, you can again through the API to send the request, set the appropriate firewall and VPN these corresponding parameters. It is possible that customers will not perceive the complex operations of these low-level, including the installation of software on login to virtual machines, including the setting of the database. Customers can not care about these things at all, he can in 5-10 minutes to get a set of our virtual private cloud environment, and this virtual private cloud includes your export bandwidth, the export of IP, routers, firewalls, VPN, including many applications inside, including subnets, In 5-10 minutes you may be able to get the entire system of virtual private cloud, and you can start using it directly.

The original enterprise needs a set of OA, on a set of CRM, he needs to apply for the purchase of servers, the need to apply for the corresponding software vendors, contact different software vendors to provide different manufacturers of products. He also needs the appropriate IT staff to come and install different software, then debug, integration. If the software is found to be inappropriate, he has to come back again, so for any small and medium-sized enterprises, the cost of such a business system is very high, this time may be a few weeks to several months. In addition to the rapid changes in the enterprise needs also difficult to make timely response, for example, enterprises now need OA, but two or three months after the need, and need a set of ERP, which is possible. This uncertainty can lead to customers not willing to use the original it model to build a new set of business systems. This also caused a lot of problems for software vendors. Software vendors will therefore waste a lot of energy on some uncertain project opportunities, so we built this platform, in fact, to provide customers and software vendors a mutual understanding of the value of a platform and window.

For software vendors, his software on our platform, can quickly access to more users, can quickly achieve the process of business negotiations and the return of funds, and for customers, he can be on this platform to quickly get more and more different manufacturers of applications, can spend very small costs, Experience a differentiation between more applications to judge more vendors. This pattern is the same as the early sale of this small commodity on Taobao. The original channel, whether you sell shoes, or sell cosmetics, you will certainly build a first-level channel, to customers, the deeper the channel, you and customers a gap between the farther, you are increasingly difficult to get customer feedback on your products, but the mode of the electric business, it provides a traditional channel can not have a lot of resources. First, you and the customer is directly face-to-face communication, you can quickly know the customer of your product evaluation, customers can also know that the product is not good, can use a comment or a point of praise and so on the way, to your product evaluation, can help you improve the product. Second, customers can also be on this platform to obtain different brands, different manufacturers of product comparisons, analysis, experience. For manufacturers, he gets more value-added services, including data analysis, advertising, and future financial services that we will jointly implement with banks. The goal of building such a platform is ultimately to achieve a platform of corporate cloud services similar to Taobao, to achieve the value of communication between the two sides.

Not easy to realize, look at the technology of sending cloud dry goods to share

CSDN: What were the biggest difficulties you encountered when you were designing this platform, and what key technologies did the platform use?

Shipeixin: Yes, actually at the beginning we also walked a lot of technical detours, we are in the design of this platform can be compatible with a number of cloud it took a lot of effort. In technology implementation, the cloud platform is the first Saas+paas Enterprise Cloud service platform, it broke through a number of technical bottlenecks, the real implementation of the cloud enterprise applications automated delivery. A lot of technical highlights, the following are some key technical points.

1. SaaS Application Market

Cloud Enterprise Cloud Application market uses the idea and technology of electric quotient to build enterprise cloud service, to provide customers with dozens of categories and hundreds of open source and commercial software applications, not only allows users to quickly find different applications and rapid experience, but also to enable customers to easily achieve comparisons, evaluation and obtain vendor support, And in an automated manner with the cloud resources to achieve rapid integration, through the online way to quickly realize the application of the open, the real realization of a one-stop service.

In the payment system, cloud also achieved a unified payment and billing system from cloud resources to application software, avoiding the hassle of users needing to get multiple bills from multiple platforms.

2. Application Installation Scripts

Although the use of mirroring can quickly build new applications, but the cloud from the outset did not use a mirror to build the application, hundreds of applications installed all the way to install the script, mainly to send the cloud very clear mirror itself there are many problems:

• High maintenance costs: each mirror needs to occupy a lot of space, and once the software is upgraded, it is completely out of use. The use of shell script can effectively avoid such problems, with a basic image to achieve the basic operating system functions, through the implementation of installation scripts to obtain download packages, upgrades, not only can greatly reduce the use of disk space, more rapid implementation of software upgrades.

• No customization: Mirrors are made of preloaded applications, so many of the application parameters, such as database administrator account and password, Exchange, and AD domain names, cannot be modified on the mirror. In the way of scripting, it is possible to implement custom parameters effectively.

• Inability to integrate: for mirrored installations, if a distributed deployment is required, such as a database using an external database, an external directory service for authentication, and a mirror that is powerless, the way in which the automated script can be implemented is entirely achievable.

For many automated installations of Windows applications, the cloud has written and tested a large number of PowerShell scripts to implement registry modifications, database configuration, domain name DNS configuration, and restart functions during application installation.

3. Automated choreography Technology

Cloud Enterprise Cloud Service platform employs an automated choreography (orchestration) technology similar to AWS Cloudformation and Opsworks, and combines innovative and application markets to transfer order information from the application market and supporting resource requirements to the automated orchestration engine. The automated Orchestration Engine is responsible for interpreting the configuration requirements, input and output parameters of the resources in the order, and automatically applying the API to the underlying IAAS provider for the appropriate resources. This approach maximizes the effort to translate the manual resource creation of the deployment process into automated process work, which can save a lot of manpower and time and, on the other hand, maximize the avoidance of human error and achieve more standardized and quality delivery.

4. Multiple Cloud Support

The different IaaS cloud, although provides the product similar, including the host, the storage, the network and so on basic resources, but in the use way as well as the external interface all have the very big difference. In order to support multiple clouds, while protecting customers from the cloud can be shielded from the difference between multiple clouds, the cloud provides a very comprehensive and detailed abstraction of the underlying IaaS, separating the commonality requirements of the resources from the underlying APIs and shielding the underlying details of different IAAS providers with a unified management control interface , but through different APIs to different IaaS application resources, to provide customers with a consistent experience.

CSDN: For this platform, what do you think is the greatest value for users?

Shipeixin: I think the first is the experience on the complete transformation, for the enterprise, I need to budget carefully, I need to be scared to do a good budgeting, good for a long time a plan, but not sure this thing I do after will change, a big decision risk. Now I can try to see if the application will meet my needs, this is, first of all, a huge shift in concept, and it must first have an experience and then decide whether it can be done; the second, the original traditional it delivery model is a upfront high input, a late high maintenance of a way, Now becomes a very small investment, I can try to do this thing, late operation, hosted on top, reduce your large amount of cost. Later expansion and maintenance also become very simple. Third, it is easy to achieve business integration, such as the unified management of identity, the unified deployment of databases, as well as the depth of coupling and integration between business systems.

CSDN: What is the profit model of the cloud platform?

Shipeixin: At this stage, we still use the resources and software sales agents to collect some of the customer's fees. But in the future, we will add more value-added services, such value-added services, including data backup services, data security services, some of our own, and some of the third party, we will be in this cooperative way to bring it in. Later, because the platform has enough users to build, there are enough vendors to support, the platform's own value, business value is displayed.

CSDN: What are the main concerns of users? What are your responses to this?

Shipeixin: At this stage, we are still a public testing phase, although our main goal at this stage is to allow users to experience this new paradigm, primarily by encouraging users to use this model more to see how different you are from traditional it. A user has moved its OA system up. Later on, there will be some software partners on our platform, to bring his customers to our platform to do his software delivery. This is actually a phase that is beyond our understanding of the experience, and many users are not limited to experiencing it. Including what we're doing, for example, I'm not sure if he's going to be able to do that. We are in the communication with the IT administrator of 3W Coffee, hope to put some of their business systems, such as access control, monitoring, logging and other business systems are moved to send clouds, to achieve more convenient access, higher reliability. Access control system is a typical chain of demand, the need to unify a set of access control system to provide some global authorization to ensure that different people on business trips to other regional stores can use the same set of door cards, and do not have to do a separate door card.

I believe this business model will become more and more aware of its advantages as you understand the business of sending cloud, because you can use it as your application or as a traditional application, but what you can do is very simple. As the 3W coffee IT manager Han Yu said, it took less than one hours to move the business system to the cloud and start using it. We can also provide databases, a range of resources and applications, such as the Web site architecture, allow users to quickly build applications that are of interest to them, and the price of the resources we offer is flat with the price of resources provided by the IaaS vendor, and we will not add any extra cost to the IaaS vendor.

CSDN: What kind of partnership do you have with these commercial software manufacturers now? What kind of cooperation do you have with these manufacturers?

Shipeixin: We will obtain the commercial software manufacturer's proxy sale right. For example, Microsoft, we are now its SPLA partner, is equivalent to the agent of Microsoft products. Those other things include smooth and accessible, and we are all talking about this proxy model. We also talked about some of the domestic open source software cooperation, such as Zen, Chunsheng has also put his three products on our platform. We hope to gradually take this platform as a window to push a good product to more users. A lot of open source software, including some commercial applications, it may be due to its own channel to promote a range of limitations and cost constraints, there is no way to use this direct and rapid mode to push more customers, so we want to have a platform so that they can reduce some of the promotional costs to get more users. For software vendors, whether it's business or open source, are trying to transfer offline sales to online sales mode, so the App Store can provide them with a smaller cost, including development costs and marketing costs, to get more customers and faster back-payment cycles, which is what software vendors need most.

CSDN: Will this platform be released later? For example, a lot of software vendors want to put this service on your platform, so what do you do for the later?

Shipeixin: We do not support this software vendor to put it on their own, but we will certainly consider the technology in an open way to support Third-party software vendor interface. This time point will be in the second half of 2015, because the current software is mainly server Based, is installed on the server software-oriented. This year we will add SaaS apps because we do perceive the rise of SaaS applications. But we still insist that the application of enterprise customer is a Iaas+saas mix. If users tend to choose lightweight, easy-to-use, simple apps, we might offer SaaS apps, and we'll go to a lot of SaaS products and put SaaS products on our platform. If the user needs a deep custom, partial traditional class application, then we will give him to recommend some of the traditional application, you can not use a standard way, a common way to do, this is the enterprise market why this threshold is relatively high one reason. For many SaaS applications, there is now a real ecological problem in the country. For this partial fragmentation application, there must be a tool or a way to allow the customer to reduce the cost of implementing and managing it in this application.

We actually want to provide such a SaaS convergence service, is to put a lot of SaaS applications on our platform, our platform to do? Our platform can do user management and unified application management, as well as unified billing and recharge management. User management, including we on the platform will set the appropriate permissions on the client, set up different applications, different users can access different application rights. This application is not necessarily a SaaS application, or it may be a server based application. For the user, only on this platform to be able to follow his account password login, can see his authorized application, he began to use it. We hope to be able to deliver more than 10 SaaS apps to the platform this year, but it depends on how well the SaaS manufacturer is cooperating.

CSDN: The cloud integration model of the store is the first domestic initiative, it is more like IaaS, PaaS, SaaS a set of fit, with ITaaS to define it more precise, almost all the business information can be step solution, can be said very convenient. So how to ensure the quality of these applications? How is the user experience guaranteed?

Shipeixin: Now, the support of resources, including the first line of support for IaaS resources, is certainly what we do, and the second line supports us and vendors, that is, IaaS vendors to provide support. But the application, we are also as far as possible at this stage to support our products, but for some of us are indeed relatively biased products, we may directly take the manufacturer's technology to provide users with support. We are sure to provide the best support to our customers in a complete delivery mode.

Security mechanisms

CSDN: Product stability, security, and this product in the user's use of some of the more sensitive data issues, what do you do in this area of effort?

Shipeixin: First, stability and security, reliability. The platform has been launched for about a month or two, and we have solved some of our own problems. But because of this usage pattern, the main thing is to send the business logic to the deployment and provide management maintenance, but in fact the final business is running in what position, the stability of the business run, in fact, the pressure is in the IaaS manufacturer, so we choose the IaaS vendors, certainly in the domestic can withstand the test of IaaS manufacturers , that is, Qingyun. At least at this stage, we have not found what the Qingyun, obvious problems, business can continue to develop to the present, we are very grateful to the strong support of Qingyun, so this reliability, in fact, two aspects, on the one hand, the reliability of our platform, the other is the reliability of IaaS platform. I think it is necessary in both the continuous running-in, according to a customer needs to make feedback, in order to continuously adjust and improve stability, we have reason to believe that the issue of reliability we can guarantee.

That security, in fact, we want to say more is the security of this piece, we have reason to do than the enterprise's own system to do more security, why say so? The cloud provides a virtual private cloud that includes multiple levels of security:

VPN: Provides VPN connection from enterprise export to cloud, all data transmission on WAN is encrypted, avoid being stolen;

NAT: To provide public network IP address to the cloud internal server address translation, to avoid the cloud of private IP address exposure on the public network;

• Firewalls: Provide comprehensive application protection, all unauthorized access will be blocked by the firewall; All firewall rules are generated automatically, there is no artificial error configuration, should not open access to the port or unauthorized address will not be able to access the resources within the cloud;

• Tenant Isolation: Although the resources of different tenants are shared on the public cloud platform, the segregation between tenants is strictly controlled by the permissions, and the logical isolation through the private network, different tenants can not access to each other content;

• Security Audit: All Access records are traceable, each operation will be recorded in detail for the later security audit to provide support;

• Disk encryption: For a specific application, the platform can provide the disk in accordance with the key of the customer's encryption, only through the verification of the customer key can be installed to the virtual machine disk;

At the same time, all the security Service rules provided by the cloud are automated and standardized, which means that the customer's system will not be harassed by threats such as the port being scanned for malicious reasons, and the password being violently cracked.

CSDN: As an IT deployment staff, he would like to choose a service, may choose some more reliable software vendors, for the cloud this model, the early market is still blank, then for these IT staff in the choice of services, you have a market education process?

Shipeixin: I think it's possible to analyze it from several levels. The first is our software, which includes a part of open source software and some commercial software. If you are a commercial software, you must rely on the business software brand, for example, Microsoft, you must know the value of his brand. The value of our platform is to help you put this application quickly presented to you, and you do not have to buy the server, buy the hardware, you go to install, you will be installed after you can experience, this is rapid deployment. But for some open source applications, we can only say that this open source application, in accordance with the use of our users accumulated in the process of evaluation, including later our community to build up, it's a comment on this product, can help more users understand whether this software is a good product, or a very general product, So this is two different.

We're just building a platform now, but we're going to give our customers something that is instructive. For example, we will do some solutions later. Applications are different characteristics of the difference, we will be based on different industries, will give different customers some recommendations. But this recommendation, said recommended are some trustworthy and validated some of the combinations, such as Microsoft's products and Ufida product mix for some large customers, such as Who's an open source product may be more suitable for a small trade-oriented customers. So it's a recommendation to the customer, this recommendation is through a lot of data validation and customer cases to verify the success, rather than casually recommend a product to you, this is a good thing, your own system, you experience, you think a thing good, you are willing to use, then you can feedback to us, We will continue to add some services like this in.

So later on, we will certainly combine software vendors, including service providers, to provide more customers with more solutions. Of course, there are more customers to my platform to use after, we will have a large number of data accumulation, and in an electrical business model to recommend him a more appropriate solution. It is equivalent to providing a common solution while providing some customization for the industry.

CSDN: Now your electronic quotient of a cloud integration model for traditional IT delivery can be said to be a subversion, there is no fear of being imitated?

Shipeixin: We're not worried about that, and we want more of our peers to get involved and help us educate our clients. If I have to say imitation, I believe someone will imitate it, but there are a few points that need to be explained. The first is positioning, which is the manufacturer, such as the IaaS vendor or the SaaS vendor, or the integrator, or the channel provider. What we do is a cloud integrator, therefore, we can support a number of manufacturers of products, there is more space, but a single manufacturer will certainly not do; integrators are divided into two extremes, large integrators only do industry customers, not small and medium-sized customers, and small integrators do not have the ability to develop our platform. Second, the threshold of the enterprise market is very high, we provide a one-stop service, from the basic resources to the application, to fully understand these, with these products and technology services, and can be differentiated according to the industry to form solutions, not casually can do.
Attach Dr. Shipeixin's observations on the SaaS market

Dr. Shipeixin has a unique view of the domestic and foreign SaaS market, which, in his view, is not a panacea, and it is not simple to assume that SaaS is a better fit for today's enterprise customers than traditional applications, and that it needs to be judged on different scenarios for different customers. But we believe that in the future with the development of SaaS manufacturers and the change of customer concept, SaaS application will have a wider application. The following is the full text:


1. Analysis of the domestic development situation of SaaS

Enterprise cloud applications, represented by SaaS, are changing the overall it landscape. The emergence of various types of SaaS has never left people's eyeballs in two years. There are big manufacturers in the lead, more are some start-ups, won the favor of investors:

Enterprise Sales management Platform for the sale of customers announced the completion of the C round of 50 million U.S. dollars of financing, by the DCM-led, a round of investors IDG and B-round of the Northern Lights and investment, Huaxing Capital as an exclusive financial advisor, this is the domestic mobile office in the field of the largest financing of start-ups;
CRM start-up Company "Easy to sell", has recently completed the B round of financing, the amount of millions of U.S. dollars. Its a-round investment in Sequoia Capital, this round of continued exclusive chase. Previously, sales have also been easy to get the angel investment funds;
Enterprise work platform today's target has completed a 10 million dollar a round of funding from the Tiger Fund;
Focus on the Enterprise Mobile Collaborative Office product Application network opened Eoopen recently announced a 10 million yuan financing. The investment by benchmarking investment, the original investment total of 10 million new investment, is in recent years in the Mobile Office product market, one of the largest single investment;
Focus on Enterprise talent management system of the North Sen company to obtain from the Jingwei and Sequoia Capital of the Tens dollar B-round financing;
Wait a minute
These lightweight SaaS applications, which provide a fast-moving mechanism to support the use of mobile terminals, a flat billing model that dwarfs the cumbersome and high-cost traditional enterprise applications, and the question of whether SaaS can quickly sweep the enterprise's application market, is there still room for traditional apps?

2. Two definitions of SaaS

Although SaaS is the abbreviation of "Software as a Service", SaaS can be divided into "true SaaS" and "Pseudo SaaS" from both structure and function.

"True SaaS" is a software application that is really built on the internet for all users, and is typically a product that some startups are developing from zero. True SaaS supports distributed architectures, consolidated databases, multi-tenant, unified upgrades, and powerful data analysis capabilities, and optimizes software performance, enabling hundreds of thousands of of people to log in at the same time to support open APIs. Billing on the use of flat billing mode, according to the user and function to distinguish between different price ranges, most of them support monthly or yearly billing mode.

"Pseudo-SaaS" refers to the use of IaaS resources (virtual machines, storage, networks, databases, etc.) to deploy existing traditional applications to the cloud, to provide users with rapid opening and use of the process. There is no difference between the functionality of the pseudo SaaS and the existing traditional application, the software structure does not have any adjustment, the mode of use is unchanged, and the performance of the support is the same as that of the traditional enterprise. But it allows customers to save a lot of time and cost of acquiring resources, reduce the learning costs of new applications, and support a wide variety of complex application scenarios. The billing model is also mostly adopted by traditional software licensing +iaas resource leasing Mixed mode.

Since there are not many "pseudo SaaS", so the media-referred SaaS refers to the "real SaaS" built on an open internet like sharing a guest, this goal, and selling it, and if not specifically, the SaaS we refer to is "real SaaS".

3. Advantages of SaaS

Why are SaaS applications so widely used that users can accumulate far more quickly than traditional applications? We can analyze it from some angles.

First of all, experience better. Traditional apps mean lengthy opening processes and bad trial experiences. In the traditional mode, an enterprise application from the decision maker concept to see the application, need to go through the vendor consultation and communication, hardware resource configuration, software and hardware installation of the lengthy process of deployment, this process often takes 2-3 weeks or more than six months time. Users are increasingly eager to see the effects of applications quickly to cope with the ever-increasing demand for business change, so the lengthy opening and delivery process, as well as the various costs (physical and human) that have not yet been seen to advance, are increasingly unacceptable to business decision-makers. SaaS applications only need to open accounts, from the requirements to the experience is only minutes of time.

Second, simple and easy to use, quick start. Like other software, enterprise applications want to go to the most standardized level to achieve maximum profit, thus increasing the functionality that many users will use, making it a hodgepodge of specific enterprise applications that were intended to address specific problems. The combination of multiple functions naturally increases the cost of learning, which is an important reason why customers cannot easily choose new products. And SaaS generally pursue a simple and extreme user experience, highlighting specific features and remove a lot of unused functions, so that users can quickly start, greatly reducing the user's learning and use of the threshold.

Third, standardization. The traditional enterprise application all means the tedious implementation process, the delivery effect depends heavily on it implementation personnel, including the network management, the implementation consultant level. A crappy network management may delay a few weeks of deployment time, and an irresponsible implementation advisor could lead to an increase in costs and a deviation from the established goal. SaaS relies largely on the normalization of software and the abstraction of the process, reducing the disruption of human factors in the delivery process through standardized or semi standardized usage processes.

Four, maintenance-free. Traditional enterprise applications also face the problem of version upgrade, the need for Terminal Services in the upgrade process, and do a good job of data backup, each upgrade is like a battle as tense. And the SaaS upgrade is more peaceful, the user basically does not have the premise of the perception to complete the system version of the upgrade.

Five, the tariff is transparent. Traditional apps mean not only fixed hardware inputs, but also extra spending that is opaque and even not clear to the IT staff, let alone staff costs. SaaS does not mean that it is cheaper than traditional applications, but by flattening, user-and time-billing, it can dramatically reduce the concern of business decision makers over the opacity of traditional IT investments, leaving business decision makers no longer thinking it is a bottomless pit.

Finally, the design concept. Traditional enterprise application of the design concept is relatively backward, are from the boss's point of view of the enterprise's internal management, hoping that the boss can understand to make decisions, and not deliberately to consider the feelings of employees. But the new SaaS application has taken the Top-down design idea, the social and mobile elements as the core design concept, embodies more "people-oriented" design concept, more easily accepted by ordinary employees.

The above characteristics, so that SaaS applications springing up in the past few years to flourish, and gradually become a new force in enterprise applications.

4. Lack of SaaS

Admittedly, while this concise SaaS has been applauded, it has only been favored by small teams, microenterprises and small microenterprises, and in traditional industries and small and medium-sized enterprises and even larger markets, it is hard to have a brighter case. This is completely different from the foreign SaaS application that has gone deep into all the big companies. We can also see that the actual sales of SaaS have not grown much, and it is estimated that the national SaaS sales are less than 5 billion and the largest SaaS platform is just over billion, which is diametrically opposed to the market's heat.

The reason, we can draw the following several aspects of the judgment:

First of all, the industry differentiation brought about by the customization requirements are difficult to meet. Chinese customers in the application of differentiated requirements more than overseas customers, often a field of a process or a role need to be defined in the way you modify. There is no problem with the pattern of traditional applications, but it is unavoidable for SaaS, the pursuit of standard and semi standardized applications. At the same time, because the SaaS accumulation time is far less than the traditional enterprise application, therefore in the industry difference support also seriously insufficient.

Second, the invisible management costs increase. By breaking the complex tradition into multiple fragmented applications, each SaaS only addresses one or two specific features, and the user's learning costs for a single SaaS are really lower. But as the total demand has not decreased, so the number of enterprise applications has increased, from the original may only need one or two applications, into the need for more than 10 kinds of applications. In the application scenario of micro-organization, there is no strict identity management and authority management requirement for the application of specific users, but the enterprise has strict account management and authority management requirements. Since identity management is distributed across a number of SaaS applications, portals and data are distributed across multiple SaaS apps, and companies do not have any control over their rights, which seriously hinders the use of SaaS applications. At the same time, multiple application of multiple billing and billing mode, also make users difficult to accept.

Third, there is the risk of vendor lock-in. Enterprise customer procurement often requires a decision-making process, so will not like the individual consumer as the price rather than the brand, they would rather believe that a large number of manufacturers to provide high prices of products, it will not be easy to choose the low price and brand name is not high start-up companies. Data and applications are the highest cost of enterprise migration and will not be replaced as easily as switches and servers. Once these startups stop offering products for a variety of reasons, businesses are losing more than just the costs that have been spent.

Four, the data security is not verifiable. Although all SaaS manufacturers are nominal data encryption and isolation technology to ensure that the enterprise data is not stolen by other tenants, but because the SaaS manufacturers generally lack of security technology and awareness of safety, data leakage incidents occur frequently. At the same time, for special sensitive data, SaaS manufacturers have no way to explain to enterprise customers how to ensure that the enterprise's data is not used by SaaS manufacturers. These security risks further increase the obstacles to the choice of enterprises.

The difficulty of data integration is increased. Although we say that traditional enterprise applications exist islands of information and chimney structure, but we still have the possibility of a unified database interface and middleware to achieve limited application integration. But in SaaS, because of the lack of eco-collaboration between SaaS vendors, the island of application systems still exists, and because the data is not in the same place, the difficulty of this integration has increased.

Finally, the domestic SaaS ecosystem is far from perfect. After years of development, SaaS has developed experience with security, compliance, open Interface APIs, and data standardization, and we can see that manufacturers including OneLogin, Mulesoft and Appdirect can easily integrate thousands of SaaS implementations, To achieve a variety of features including account opening, identity authentication and data integration. And look at home, although there are also hundreds of kinds of applications, some of the star products, but there are many Shanzhai products. Few SaaS can support external open APIs, support user registration calls and open data interfaces, and even it is difficult to find applications that register via APIs. And can not get through the link between applications, you can not achieve a deeper level of enterprise application. Domestic SaaS to improve a lot of things.

5. Conclusion

As you can see, SaaS is not a panacea, and it is not simple to think that SaaS is necessarily more suitable for today's enterprise customers than traditional applications, and that it needs to be judged by different scenarios for different customers. But we believe that in the future with the development of SaaS manufacturers and the change of customer concept, SaaS application will have a wider application.

At the same time, we believe that the combination of SaaS and the characteristics of traditional applications, as well as the needs of enterprise customers for identity, data, business processes, and resilient resources, will in the near future be accompanied by a combination of SaaS applications, identity management, data consolidation, and cloud computing, It can take care of the flexibility of SaaS applications, a combination of organic and traditional applications, without sacrificing enterprise control.

Related Article

Contact Us

The content source of this page is from Internet, which doesn't represent Alibaba Cloud's opinion; products and services mentioned on that page don't have any relationship with Alibaba Cloud. If the content of the page makes you feel confusing, please write us an email, we will handle the problem within 5 days after receiving your email.

If you find any instances of plagiarism from the community, please send an email to: info-contact@alibabacloud.com and provide relevant evidence. A staff member will contact you within 5 working days.

A Free Trial That Lets You Build Big!

Start building with 50+ products and up to 12 months usage for Elastic Compute Service

  • Sales Support

    1 on 1 presale consultation

  • After-Sales Support

    24/7 Technical Support 6 Free Tickets per Quarter Faster Response

  • Alibaba Cloud offers highly flexible support services tailored to meet your exact needs.