Vision SaaS services are designed to drive costs out of the SaaS model and minimize long-term integration requirements
Santa Clara, Calif., March 21, 2005 --OpSource, a leading enabler of Software as a Service (SaaS), has partnered with Accelerance, the experts in outsourced software development, to address the key software development issues facing software vendors that seek to offer software as a service. OpSource will leverage Accelerance's Vision SaaS (sm), a suite of SaaS enablement services that help software vendors qualify and/or transform their licensed software applications for delivery on-demand.
Vision SaaS services are designed to drive costs out of the SaaS model and minimize long-term integration requirements. These services include Multi-Instance Qualification, Multi-Instance Conversion, Multi-Tenant Conversion, Proprietary Database Conversion and Web Services Integration.
"Realizing the benefits of the SaaS model requires fundamental changes to a software vendor's business model, software architecture and operational structure," noted Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource. "We partnered with the experts at Accelerance to address the critical path software development issues associated with transforming a licensed software application to an on-demand application. Together, OpSource and Accelerance speed the software vendor's time-to-market and ensure an on-time, on-budget, on-scope SaaS implementation."
"Multiple Accelerance teams are experienced with SaaS, and can help software vendors migrate quickly to a new delivery model, without losing focus on the existing delivery model," explained Steve Mezak, founder and CEO, Accelerance. "We provide installation and load testing to determine the optimal set-up for a multi-instance configuration, and can transform the software vendor's software to migrate from multi-instance to multi-tenant. Accelerance teams can also develop a multi-instance or multi-tenant application from a client/server application. Most importantly, we can modify the software vendor's existing software product without disrupting the flow of new features and enhancements that existing customers expect."
The Path to SaaS Nirvana When a software application is offered as a service over the Internet, the first step is to migrate from a single-instance (one instance of the application per server) to a multi-instance application (multiple instances of the application reside on the same server so that several customers can share the same infrastructure). Once the software is running effectively as a multi-instance SaaS application and the software vendor can serve customers on demand, there are three possible directions to pursue in further driving down operational costs and improving functionality. First, the software vendor might further drive down infrastructure costs and gain operational efficiencies by migrating from a multi-instance to a multi-tenant architecture (a single instance of the software supports multiple customers, which further minimizes the amount of hardware needed). Second, the software vendor could drive considerable cost out of the model by migrating from expensive, proprietary third party databases and middleware to low cost or no-cost open source software. Lastly, the software vendor can add Web services, to facilitate integration with other on-demand applications, which would offer a significant competitive differentiator.
