Cloud-based solutions are clearly here to stay, which is a really good thing for enterprises and consumers. In the enterprise, software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings have been the dominant cloud-based solution in recent history. More and more organizations are reaping the economic benefits of adopting SaaS offerings across a broad range of software categories. For example, cloud-hosted technologies have allowed us to create a proven enterprise software SaaS solution.
While this mega-trend continues to gain momentum, there is an ongoing back-channel conversation that is oblivious to most of the business consumers of SaaS offerings. The architects, software developers, CTOs, industry analysts, and even investors have been engaged in a dialog about the best way to build SaaS solutions.
At the end of last year Gartner published research defining three styles of cloud-based solution architectures — cloud-hosted, cloud-optimized, and cloud-native¹. The previously mentioned conversation has been somewhat cloud-native biased in the past, at least within the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) community. “Real SaaS” meant multi-tenant. That was absolutely the case in the early days of SaaS as it was the only viable option. Today ISVs have a wide range of advanced technologies, including virtualization that brings a completely new set of vendors and solutions to the SaaS game.
The cloud-hosted approach has represented a powerful agent of change for Planview. Over the past two years we have seen approximately half of our new customers choose our SaaS offering. This has brought a new level of value to our customers as well as transformed the economics of our own business model in a positive way. Cloud-hosted technologies have allowed us to combine a proven enterprise software solution with the economics of SaaS — a powerful combination for both our customers and Planview.
As we have gone through this transformation we have learned a lot and gained new insights from our customers. Some of these insights relate to the unique capabilities that a virtualization-driven SaaS offering can enable. Over the coming weeks, check out our YouTube channel as we touch on these benefits:
- Market leading solution with SaaS economics, today
- Deployment flexibility to meet your business needs
- Ultimate configurability to support your business processes
- Security of your own instance
- Rapid implementation for all deployment models
- Upgrade on your terms
It is important to note that in a technology industry that is always ready to battle based on strong platform allegiances, that is not our intent (it appears that we can count on Larry Ellison to fight this one for us). Consumers are the ultimate winners, regardless of the cloud deployment model, but we felt it was worth taking a few minutes to talk about some of the relative advantages of virtualization and cloud-hosted technologies.
We look forward to hearing what you think. What cloud framework works best for your organization and why? Share your thoughts and experiences by leaving a comment below. Subscribe to the Planview YouTube Channel and watch more videos related to this topic.
¹ Gartner, Inc. (Eric Knipp), “Creating Cloud Solutions: A Decision Framework, 2011” Sept 6, 2011.
