B-SaaS-M

For contemporary computer usage, the SaaS model has many attractive advantages that account for its growing popularity. For instance SaaS avoids the initial up front cost of purchasing software and the associated hardware; the ongoing maintenance, and salary costs for employees to maintain a new systems are all avoided.

At the expense of IT as competitive differentiation, these cost advantages are coupled with the fact that many types of software applications have been commoditized: networking speed and availability are trusted, centralised resources are shared across many users and afford higher levels of security, fault tolerance, disaster recovery and access greater expertise. Plus, SaaS examples like Salesforce.com demonstrate the credibility of the concept. So potentially you end up with less cost, less worries and higher quality of service – sounds good eh?

As the business model has matured the SaaS vendors are using increasingly sophisticated techniques to optimise their business, optimise client usage of resources, and deploy up selling techniques. All of this demonstrates the early maturity of a successful business concept.

Users have the right to expect SaaS providers will deploy best practices and the best technology in order to ensure security, high availability, good performance and continual improvement to ensure the quality of service (QoS) they require. Business Service Management (BSM) has an important role to play because of its unprecedented ability to provide service management the proven best practice way of managing IT systems.

SaaS systems, like all IT systems, will be subject to change, for example, upgrades, system expansion and maintenance – and incidents will also occur causing user-impacting problems. To ensure the viability of SaaS is maintained as these systems grow in size and complexity with their increasing popularity then SaaS providers need automated management solutions that can scale to cope with demand, size and complexity.

BSM components like Service Level Management (SLM) and Service Contract Management provide automated and proactive ability to ensure the QoS consumers expect. Since they provide automated root cause analysis of QoS threatening issues. Whereas, BSM’s Configuration Management System (CMS) ensures the risk of change is minimised by making change management aware of the potential impact of a proposed change.

We anticipate as SaaS becomes more popular, more complex and more competitive between SaaS providers. As such we predict that we will see the same rapid adoption of BSM as we have seen by service provision vendors.