Losing control in the SaaS lane

Are smaller businesses right to steer clear of hosted apps?

Smaller firms tend to shy away from hosted applications because of worries about the risk to sensitive data. Those fears are unfounded, says Dale Vile of Freeform Dynamics - the real issues are to do with your supplier's upgrade philosophy and practice.

Evangelists for software as a service (SaaS) say it is the way of the future. Indeed, some analysts claim that SaaS will become the dominant mechanism for delivering applications over the next few years. Whether or not you believe that, it is clear the SaaS bandwagon is rolling.

But anyone taking a more objective view would conclude that the business community is treating SaaS with what can best be described as 'measured interest'.

This is confirmed through Freeform Dynamics research, which consistently shows that while customers generally believe SaaS opens up some new options for application delivery, most aren't yet ready for a wholesale move to the SaaS approach. Why is this?

Well, there are various reasons why organisations are not jumping into SaaS with both feet. First, there is the traditional paranoia about the risks associated with letting someone else run your systems and store your sensitive and business-critical data.

The irony with this is it's smaller businesses more than most that have this kind of hang-up. These are the organisations typically least well equipped from both a technology and process perspective to manage and secure their information.

It's an illogical fear because your information will be at least as safe and secure with the right SaaS provider, if not more so. But the perceived loss of operational control nevertheless remains one of the most common objections to the SaaS approach.

As a small and highly distributed business, with neither the time nor the inclination to install and run servers, we have been committed to the SaaS approach for a couple of years now to provide messaging, collaboration and other business systems functionality.

This has worked very well for us, not just in terms of low hassle and low-risk computing but also because we have access to enterprise class functionality that we would not otherwise enjoy as a business of our size.

But about six months ago we saw a demonstration of the latest release of the applications underpinning the online service by the original vendor of the software.

This demonstration drew our attention to some significant new functionality that would provide great incremental benefit to our business but which would not be available for many months through the service to which we were subscribed.

The SaaS provider concerned, a relatively large player with a significant customer base, said nothing could be done - the scale of their operation and the nature of the upgrade translated to a significant migration exercise for them, so it was just a case of waiting for the upgrade.

It's an understandable position for the provider to find itself in but it has already been six months and we face another three months' wait before the service upgrade takes place. So we decided to look for an alternative provider to deliver a service based on the latest functionality.

Sounds easy enough but it has been difficult to identify a credible alternative that provides the same application mix as our existing provider.

The question then becomes whether it is sensible to move just one of the applications where we need the new functionality, which happens to be a collaboration and content management solution, and leave everything else where it is.

Of course the downside is that such an approach could lead to some interesting challenges integrating functionality across the two service providers we would end up with.

Having considered all of the options, the outcome of these deliberations is almost certainly going to be a dual-provider approach, and we'll report back to silicon.com readers on our experiences with this in due course.

In the mean time, the big lesson we have learned is that if you are looking at moving down the SaaS route, it is important to make sure that you are on the same page as the provider when it comes to upgrade philosophy and practice.

You may be looking for a service to keep pace with industry developments. On the other hand, a faster moving provider forcing new releases on you every few months may be viewed as a distraction or risk if you are looking for stability.