In the traditional mode, manufacturers deploy software products to multiple customer terminals within the enterprise through licensing to achieve delivery. SaaS defines a new delivery mode, which also makes the software return to the essence of service.
The essence of enterprise deploying information software is to serve its own operation and management. The appearance of software is the informationization of business process, and its essence is the first service mode. SaaS has changed the traditional way of providing software services, reduced a lot of upfront investment required for local deployment, further highlighted the service attributes of information software, or become the mainstream delivery mode of information software market in the future.
Characteristics and Application of Internet
On the one hand, SaaS services provide services to users through Internet browsers or WebServices/Web2.0 programs, which makes SaaS applications have typical Internet technical characteristics. On the other hand, because SaaS greatly shortens the time and space distance between users and SaaS providers, the marketing and delivery of SaaS services are very different from traditional software.
For example, online ERP, online CRM and other module products provided by NetSuite, a well-known product in SaaS software industry, are all based on the network. This advantage is that you can surf the Internet without any hardware cost and professional system maintenance personnel, and a browser can use ERP and CRM systems. Fast implementation, convenient use and low price all depend on the Internet characteristics of SaaS products.
Multi-tenant characteristics
SaaS services usually provide services to hundreds of different customers (also called tenants) based on standard software systems. This requires SaaS services to support data and configuration isolation between different tenants, so as to ensure the security and privacy of each tenant's data, as well as the personalized needs of users such as interface, business logic and data structure. Because SaaS supports multiple tenants at the same time, each tenant has many users, which poses a great challenge to the performance, stability and scalability of the infrastructure platform supporting software. As an Internet-based software delivery model, the core task of SaaS is to optimize the performance and operating cost of software after large-scale application.
Service characteristics
SaaS enables software to be used by customers in the form of Internet-based services, so many issues must be considered, such as the signing of service contracts, the measurement of service usage, the guarantee of online service quality and the collection of service fees. Traditional software usually doesn't consider these problems.
Extensible function
Scalability means maximizing system concurrency and using system resources more effectively. For example, applications: optimizing the persistence of resource locks, using stateless processes, using resource pools to share key resources such as lines and database connections, caching reference data, and partitioning large databases.