Workday’s Breakdown of ‘The Real SaaS’
Posted on Fri, Jun 24, 2011
The recent Manifesto from Workday that thoroughly examines the myths and realities of ‘The Real SaaS’ in the enterprise. The article explains the true meaning of SaaS, how it works and the important factors to consider when choosing a vendor. As I begin to apply these beliefs to how we are servicing our customers and thinking about our role in the SaaS for PPM industry, I found the breakdown from Workday to be extremely insightful to our customers and our company.
The expansive definition of real SaaS and how it’s different from hosted or on-premise solutions can be broken down to these key elements:
1. Customers share a single version of the software
2. Customers share IT infrastructure and operational resources
3. Updates are included with the service at no extra charge
4. World-class security for data center operations, applications and data
5. Service level guarantees including uptime, backup and disaster recovery
6. No perpetual licenses (pay-as-you-go pricing)
Another crucial part of selecting a PPM SaaS vendor is their Multi-Tenancy capabilities. Workday’s Manifesto explains that a multi-tenant architecture can be utilized in a SaaS environment when a vendor is able to provide a single version of their software and serve multiple customers (tenants) that all use that version.
And finally, Workday points out the true impact of ‘The Real SaaS’ on Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment. Because the software is delivered as a service, vendors can spread the costs of hardware and data centers over time instead of upfront. New features are constantly updated automatically, so the cost of upgrades will never increase. Overall costs are also predictable and can be customized according to your needs. And lastly, ‘The Real SaaS’ frees up IT staff from the burden of managing the IT infrastructure and operations.
The only conclusion that I can make is that a ‘Real SaaS’ provider like Innotas can lower IT costs, provide the most current version of the software, and give users access to the business software at any time, from anywhere. Now that’s Real.
-Kevin Kern