SaaS and demand for Wide Area Data Services
Business at the speed of SaaS requires more efficient infrastructure, James Hall says
James Hall: Bandwidth demands will increase with SaaS and the channel must address itself to this challenge
Software as a Service (SaaS) has gone mainstream. Applications as diverse as CRM, business intelligence, collaboration, supply chain management, secure email, extranet, human capital management, and service desk are being offered on demand via the internet rather than on site, on corporate servers.
Cloud computing is about providing IT as a service from third-party platforms hosted by the internet. It is SaaS plus platform-as-a-service, storage-as-a-service, and a few other components. Examples include Google Apps and Amazon EC2.
Users cease to care which servers hold which applications and data. It is simply in the cloud somewhere.
Yet both depend on rapid, resilient high speed broadband internet connectivity and high-performing networks to move data and applications around, especially as staff increasingly may work remotely.
Wide Area Data Services (WDS) speed up the movement of file and application sharing between locations across the corporate WAN.
We think WDS is in demand in datacentres alongside cloud computing and SaaS adoption.
As cloud use accelerates so will the use of clever WDS and file sharing services (WAFS) to speed up and deliver data and applications.
The typical enterprise has a heterogeneous mix of data and applications moving across the network to remote sites. Types of data include email, web-based enterprise applications such as Microsoft SharePoint, database applications, ERP, FTP, backup and replication, as well as multiple proprietary applications.
Take Microsoft SharePoint deployments, which have become widespread in enterprises over the past year. For these collaboration projects to be successfully embedded in an organisation, end users need to be able to access and edit files when connected, normally via a corporate WAN.
These applications are often deployed to replace inefficient file sharing between branch offices and to create centralised document storage.
If accessing old files or uploading new ones takes too long, users will revert to less productive collaboration methods. Such projects will fail.
By looking at WDS, IT integrators do not need to go through the hard sell of asking for additional bandwidth for applications such as SharePoint.
Through careful planning it may even be possible to have cheaper network connections, storage and maintenance.
WDS solutions are therefore an essential part of the mix for an array of application and systems integration tasks.
James Hall is marketing head at Teneo