Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming a very compelling way to run and use the software applications. SaaS offers on demand pay and use software such as on demand CRM software, on demand ERP software and on demand commercial software etc. The user of the software need not buy the software to use it due to which the SaaS model is also called rent a software model. In some cases, the enterprise software companies will develop the applications that support SaaS platform and make them available on the SaaS platform themselves. In other cases, independent organizations might buy the applications and run them on the SaaS platform to deliver application services to other end user organizations.
The Challenge
The enterprise applications available in the marketplace are usually not architected and designed to run on the SaaS platform for the following reasons:
- Most of the SaaS applications do not properly address the critical issues such as billing, performance analysis and technical support.
- In traditional software applications, it is not possible to isolate the users and the
associated data according to the organization to which it belongs.
- The traditional applications allow you to customize the application functionality only in one
way and therefore the application same functionality to all its users irrespective of the
organization they belong to.
- The traditional applications usually do not support encryption of the sensitive data, which
becomes necessary if the application data resides outside.
- The applications are usually not well architected to scale as the number of users increase.
The application scalability is important to cater to the load created by users from multiple
organizations that the single instance of the application has to support.
Infogain’s SaaS Solution
Infogain has architected, designed, and developed applications and web services that support the requirements of the SaaS platform. These applications have the following important features:
- Billing Support: Infogain provides the best billing system that makes it possible for corporate customers to sign up and manage the billing process online, and view performance metrics. For example, this system can measure the duration spent by a particular user and on the basis of the time and kind of usage the user can be billed.
- Multi-tenant Support: The application’s User Interface, Business Logic, and Data model are designed to be aware of the organization to which the user and the associated data belongs.
- Meta-Data Driven Applications: To support business processes of multiple organizations, it is necessary that the look and feel provided by the user interface, process flow that is implemented by the business logic, and data elements that are saved within the database can be customized or configured according to the organization specific needs. The application is therefore architected to allow configuration of the user interface, business process, business rules, and data elements. The configuration information is saved in the form of a meta data within the database. This information is pulled out at the run-time to enable the application to behave based on the organization to which the user accessing the application belongs.
- Security: Infogain recommends using Asymmetric key based encryption in cases where only a small sub-set of data is sensitive. In application where there is a large amount of sensitive data, Asymmetric key based encryption/decryption causes performance impact.
- Scalability: Infogain develops highly scalable custom web applications using techniques such as statelessness, caching reference data, optimizing locking duration, and shared pool of resources like threads, network, and database connections. Infogain has also used effective database partitioning to scale application performance. Infogain has a performance-testing lab equipped with hardware resources and testing tools to conduct comprehensive performance testing and tune the applications.
Business Benefits
Infogain has skills and experience in building applications that can run on SaaS platform. This experience enables a software company to build its new products using SaaS platform or re-architect and enhance its existing software products or application to support SaaS platform. Infogain’s phased approach enables an existing enterprise software product to acquire all attributes of the SaaS model within the two or three future releases. |
