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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.

There were a lot of acronyms and keywords being bandied about at Gartner ITxpo this year. A Google search on the minds of the attendees would have generated a lot of hits on SOA, Globalization, Sourcing, Enterprise [Web] 2.0, “Free” Software, SaaS, and Cloud Computing. Social Networking was also an interesting thread that passed through all the other topics that attendees were abuzz about.

A large majority of the exhibiting vendors of course tagged their displays, demonstrations, and 30 second pitches with these terms to ensure that they too garnered as much attention as possible. I had a number of discussions with existing Managed Objects customers as well as parties interested in BSM about these trends and how to incorporate them into a cohesive strategy.

The BSM approach to dealing with these varied (and sometimes opposing) technologies is to focus on the service as a whole vs. individual moving parts and silos. As a customer of the power company, I expect that a flip of a light switch produces a predictable outcome every time – the lights come on. If they don’t, I don’t expect to hear details from the power company about all the potential issues that they are looking into ranging from failures in relay stations, downed power lines, problems with grids in neighboring states, etc. I count on them knowing the scope and source of the problem very quickly and getting it resolved. Electricity is an essential service and that level of understanding of what’s going on in the various moving parts of the power business is crucial.

Translating this type of operational model to IT management is what produces an effective BSM strategy. With IT becoming more complex (SOA, Enterprise 2.0, open source) and diffuse (Globalized, xSourced, SaaS, Cloud Computing) simultaneously, it is crucial to provide the best-of-breed management solutions for SMEs in each of these areas. Stopping here, however, leads to the all too common trap of too many tools and not enough answers. The key ingredient is a federated system that combines KPIs from each of the specialized solutions and allows a business level view to be constructed from it, that is, a true Manager of Managers with customizable dashboards for all parties with a vested interest in service availability and performance.

Implementation of this BSM strategy requires access to data connectors that span multiple vendors’ management solutions, expansion opportunities for the next generation of platforms, and most importantly – an analysis engine that can handle the complexity of the combined data feeds and make it available to a flexible presentation layer for the users of the system.

Although there were many different solutions to these challenges presented at ITxpo, a successful BSM deployment should offer a simple and personalized iGoogle-like experience for managing and viewing content of underlying IT infrastructure and the applications that run on top of it, and that’s one thing that everyone agreed on.

-- Abbas

Many years ago, when I was deployed as a soldier, my mother would write me a letter twice a week to help me keep up with what was happening back home. My replies were brief and didn’t do much to assuage the worry that most mothers feel in that situation. When I would finally come home, my mother didn’t always recognize my face – this was a time before digital photos – and it had been so long since she had seen me.

My how times change, because by contrast, I recently was able to follow my friends as they traveled around the globe for 12 months, receiving almost instantaneous updates on where they were and what they were doing that day, including photos, video and comments from several of our other friends. It’s perhaps an understatement to say we live in the world of Web 2.0, where the Web has become a tool that helps people stay in touch, collaborate or just post random thoughts that others may want to read. The network truly has become the computer.

In this new world of continuous information flow, software has become abstract, moving away from the computer in favor of Software as a Service (SaaS) based applications. SaaS applications have many advantages over traditional applications, in terms of mobility (you need never migrate your information when you move to a new computer) and very basic system resource requirements (they are designed to run on your browser, and are powered by a server that could potentially be on the other side of the globe), but most importantly, SaaS applications have a very broad market appeal due to the low overhead involved with not having to design, implement and maintain the system. It is this low overhead that lowers the entry bar for many small to medium sized businesses into realms that would otherwise be outside of their financial and technical capabilities.

Interestingly enough, for Business Service Management (BSM) vendors like Managed Objects, this opens up new opportunities to deliver SaaS-based BSM offerings that will have broad market mid-tier market appeal -- especially through its partner channel.

With so many businesses entrusting mission critical data and applications to remote service providers, SaaS based businesses, more than ever, need to examine their service management architectures in order to continually improve the service being provided to end users who are increasingly reliant on these services. Seeing as many SaaS based applications are still in their infancy, it remains to be seen whether this will indeed happen. - Jonathan Golan