ASP

  • May 20, 2010

    • Sage’s introduction of SalesLogix for cloud computing has caused me to do a lot of thinking.  The operative terms we use in the industry for software functionality delivered across the Internet is SaaS or now cloud computing and numerous vendors find themselves twisting themselves and the definition into barely recognizable forms.  Enough of this I say, let’s do a re-think.

    If SaaS and cloud computing are mysterious to you, let me provide some background.

    I started covering the field (it wasn’t a market yet) in 2000 and I devoted my practice at Aberdeen Group to it.  In those early years other terms dominated the discussion, notably, hosted, on-demand and ASP.  All applications were hosted and available on-demand but the earliest distinction, one that persists today, was between ASP’s and multi-tenant solutions.

    Briefly, ASP’s or application service providers offered client server products like Siebel served from a central location across the Internet.  It was slow going and each customer had a single instance of the software running out on the Internet.  It didn’t work out well and many VC funds took goose eggs on their report cards from the ASP’s.

    Multi-tenant was another matter.  Salesforce.com was a pioneer but so were Salesnet, RightNow and UpShot.  Ironically, only Salesforce understood the power and value of its proposition (RightNow got religion a little later) and most treated the multi-tenant on-demand solution as simply a delivery model and not much more.  UpShot was bought by Siebel, Salesnet by RightNow and the debate about superiority abated because Salesforce and RightNow (which hardly competed then) had prevailed.

    Then something interesting happened.  Vendors like Oracle (which bought Siebel) started dabbling in on-demand services and began delivering application services that hybridized the on-demand and ASP models.  They did this by re-architecting away from client-server and supporting applications in browsers.  They then began hosting their applications in a have it your way scenario.  The re-architected applications had been retrofitted to support the multi-tenant model but multi-tenancy was strictly voluntary.  Customers could elect to run their applications as single instances in their IT departments or from a remote data center.

    With multi-tenancy everyone shares a single instance of the application and through metadata configures and customizes their instance.  All data in a multi-tenant system is stored in one server farm with metadata again serving to segregate it.  Some people worry about this virtual segregation but so far it has been resilient to corruption and hacking.  Nonetheless, some vendors offered single tenant solutions to assuage jittery nerves.

    But wait there’s more.

    Terminology evolution continued and SaaS or software as a service and cloud computing have been front and center for several years (in the case of SaaS).  In its quest to differentiate multi-tenant from conventional single tenant, the industry keeps adding differentiators.  SaaS has usually meant multi-tenant and cloud usually refers to a plethora of computing services available on the Internet.  So, raw computing power is also called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), there’s still SaaS and cloud seems to refer to platform — the whole computing stack of hardware, operating system, database, middleware, applications and more.

    So where does this leave us?

    In a word, confused.

    The relative dearth of terms has caused us to re-use what we have in ways that have confused the market.  I also do not leave out the possibility of savvy marketers hitching a ride on a popular term to bend it to mean whatever they need it to, which lead me to my opening paragraph.

    So I propose the following.

    ASP is the new term used to describe a single tenant implementation in some remote data center that serves applications across the Internet.  A vendor that serves multiple customers with this architecture would be said to be delivering an application service in single tenant mode. Full stop.  No need to apologize for it.  If that’s what the customer wants then sell it to them.  It doesn’t have all the advantages of multi-tenant cloud computing but some people clearly don’t see these things as advantages anyhow.

    SaaS refers to multi-tenant application delivery across the Internet.

    Cloud computing is an umbrella term encompassing ASP and SaaS as well as IaaS and Platforms.  ASP’s and SaaS providers may very well use infrastructure from other cloud providers as Sage is doing with SalesLogix.

    My whole point in doing this is simple.  I think the industry and the market are mature enough for us to develop some new terms or possibly adapt an old one.  Since there are obviously several models for delivering software as a service, why not differentiate enough to give concreteness to them?  Calling everything SaaS without qualifiers is not helpful to the market or the customer and the confusion it can cause can only slow down a sales cycle and who needs that?

    Published: 14 years ago


    Perhaps the most interesting CRM development to come out of Denver this week was Sage’s unveiling of its SaaS or cloud offering.  But now that the initial hoopla has died down (mine included) it’s time to take a more measured look at what is being delivered.

    As I mentioned in an earlier post on my blog the announcement means that Sage is offering a hosted version of SalesLogix but not one that has been re-architected to take advantage of multi-tenancy.  The company still legitimately claims a better total cost of ownership profile for SalesLogix because the arrangement off-loads from the partner the need to support a physical installation and from the customer, the cost of most infrastructure.  The usual configuration and modification cycle remains the same however.

    So is this good or not?  I say both.

    First, let’s ‘fess up, this is not SaaS or cloud computing, except in the broadest possible definition you can imagine.  Amazon’s EC2 compute services, which delivers infrastructure as a service (IaaS), provides the cloud aspect.  It’s really ASP or application service provider, a model that waned away in the last decade for competitive reasons.  ASP is back because the applications are no longer client-server and thus have lower server overhead; that single change should make the model much more competitive.

    Sage is betting that this change is enough to help its partners battle against NetSuite, Salesforce and RightNow (and others) by enabling them to check off the SaaS box in any bake-off and that’s a good point.  In fact, in briefings with SVP Larry Ritter and EVP and GM Joe Bergera that scenario came up.  Sage partners can continue the discussion about CRM and business issues with prospects once they’re past the SaaS beauty pageant and for them it’s a good thing.

    Sage’s secret sauce has always been its partners.  The channel may be hard to administer at times but one thing you have to admit is that partners get right into the shoes of their customers in ways that software sales people simply cannot.  No wonder then that most SaaS companies are trying to breathe life into a channel solution.  Microsoft has sold through a channel for a long time, NetSuite is building one and even Salesforce has its version with its AppExchange developers who sell seats as a matter of course.

    Sage’s strategy from here is to enable a hybridized approach to its solutions by offering the choice to customers over core CRM functions but increasingly to also offer complementary SaaS solutions that leverage customer data wherever it happens to reside.  That may represent an optimum for this business model, at least for now.

    On the other hand, though, Sage seems to be taking its time bringing out complementary solutions and appears to regard that as its domain.  It would be better if the company opened up this space to more competition and contribution from partners and ISVs.  A more open approach would enable Sage to stock its catalog faster and make the promise a reality sooner.  The company’s statement so far is that it’s going for quality over quantity but I have a mild disagreement here.  I think it’s better to look for quality by letting a thousand flowers bloom and picking the best, rather than by over controlling the process.

    SalesLogix in the cloud takes the company a long way to delivering lower cost solutions but Sage still has work to do.  Its customers represent a market very much oriented toward operational efficiency as opposed to, say, customer intimacy.  It needs to deliver low cost, easy to implement and deliver solutions, a quest that never ends.  Now that infrastructure has been dealt with Sage can focus more attention on business processes and vertical deployments, which is always on its roadmap.

    So to net it out, Sage was the odd man out in the hosted services derby but that changed this week because Sage is now in the hosted services game.  It’s a solution that might seem odd to a SaaS purist, but it fits the special circumstances of a channel operation.  I think we need a new name to distinguish multi-tenant SaaS and cloud computing from solutions that simply use IaaS, something that is assertive rather than pejorative.  ASP anyone?

    Published: 14 years ago