June 2011 Archives

I will bet that in some form or fashion you have Software as a Service (SaaS) in your organization. Now, I am not talking about packages that have been purchased and installed on your servers - I am talking about true SaaS. Where the software is running in the 'cloud' on your SaaS provider's servers. There is a lot of hype around SaaS and the hope that in the near future all your applications will simply be purchased in the cloud and start working immediately. Sounds great - right?

Reality check!

For most of us in Enterprise IT, the reality is that what makes our business different is the way we go about delivering our products and services to the market. This means that an off-the-shelf, standardized SaaS application is not going to solve our needs. Sure, SaaS is great for many of the commodity processes like payroll processing, accounting, etc. But what about the processes that make your business unique - is SaaS going to work here?

Many organizations I have talked to are trying to force-fit SaaS to work for these unique processes. They are struggling with wanting to customize their SaaS, which is difficult. I see things like only using pieces of the SaaS app and trying to build new application functionality for the processes that are unique. Why are they doing this?

 

Well, for one, the promise of getting the application up and running really fast is a big attraction to the business. SaaS makes this possible due to the zero time and cost associated with setting up the infrastructure to run the application. But all of these SaaS benefits are lost once you start customizing it. When you try to adapt the SaaS offering to your unique needs, what started as a really fast time to market initiative, will quickly turn into a nightmare of tweaking and hacking an inadequate API and data model.

 

This might seem counter intuitive, but I think the answer lines in Platform as a Service (PaaS). Let me explain, we are starting to see new, extremely productive and easy to use PaaS offerings that give you rapid application development (RAD) with 'instant' setup to get your project started immediately. I like to call this "RAD PaaS". Even more interesting... what happens when you couple free applications with the RAD PaaS environment? Now you can quickly deliver a custom fit application faster than you could configure the SaaS package. Thus, the new wave of RAD PaaS offerings will provide a custom SaaS experience, spelling the end of SaaS for anything but a truly standardized business processes.

OutSystems recently published a new eBook highlighting three customers who delivered unique applications in the cloud. Two of these examples are actually about replacing existing SaaS applications and taking advantage of this new generation of RAD PaaS offerings to accelerate deliverability and cut costs. Check it out here.

 

So, how about your business? Is SaaS working for you? Have you tried RAD PaaS yet?

On May 19 and 20 we had another great edition of our user conference, the NextStep. It was an amazing event with the largest ever gathering of our customers, our partners, members of the press, and OutSystems employees.

During these two days we had keynotes, technical sessions, personal demos, breakfast tables, lunches and coffee breaks. And in all of these everybody shared their work experiences, their expertise using the Agile Platform, their ideas on how to make IT more efficient, and a myriad of other topics were discuss around making business and IT life easier.

So that you have an idea of how busy the event was this year, here are a few of the numbers that made NextStep '11 so awesome!

We had a lot of fun organizing this event, and hope everybody enjoyed it. But this was only possible thanks to our fabulous speakers, to our sponsoring partners, to everyone that helped assemble and organize the venue and, of course, to everybody that attended and turned NextStep into a great show. Thank you very much!

We've made a lot of material available online to those that attended and want to review it, and to those that couldn't make it but wished they were there. You can get it at the NextStep website.