SaaS: Pros, cons and leading vendors

Cloud Services Brokerages
The burgeoning SaaS market poses a problem for CIOs, CTOs and IT managers: how do you go about selecting an optimal set of services for your particular business, and how do you manage the resulting collection of subscriptions, SLAs, APIs and data structures?

This is where a relatively new kind of service, the Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB), can help. Sitting between the customer and the cloud providers, the CSB can provide access to an aggregation of SaaS partners, adding value in the form of expertise and tooling for migration, integration, customisation and management, plus the convenience of a central billing point. Think of CSBs as the 'cloudy' equivalent of the system integrator. Examples are Appirio, Cloud Sherpas and the UK-based Nephos Technologies.

CSBs won't suit every kind of business: smaller companies are unlikely to deploy enough SaaS applications to justify going through an intermediary, while very large enterprises should have enough in-house IT manpower and expertise to effectively become their own cloud-service brokers. But for a multitude of mid-sized businesses, employing a CSB may well look like an attractive proposition.

Many telecoms, IT and other services providers will see cloud service brokerage as a useful business opportunity, and enterprises may require assistance in setting up an internal cloud brokerage. This is where Jamcracker comes in. Jamcracker helps companies become external or internal CSBs via the Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN), which includes an extensive catalogue of third-party cloud services with centrally managed provisioning, access, security, billing, administration and support.

Conclusion
The SaaS market is taking off in a big way, with startups exploring multiple niches in numerous software categories, established players busily acquiring and integrating the most promising new services, and CSBs helping to smooth companies' paths into the cloud.

For new businesses, in particular, it's almost a 'no-brainer' to quickly deploy a collection of SaaS business apps and pay for them with a monthly subscription, rather than invest heavily in on-premises IT infrastructure and in-house technical support. Perhaps the biggest problem facing small businesses is the enormous amount of choice that's already available in the SaaS market — particularly if they're unwilling or unable to sign up with a cloud services broker.

Larger businesses have a different set of problems to contend with when it comes to SaaS adoption, mostly centering around integration with existing on-premise enterprise applications (into which many may well be locked with costly contracts). Still, enterprises looking to expand into new regions, or adopt new 'social' business processes, may well find that SaaS is the most cost-effective way to go.