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Saas makes sense because many large organizations are incapable of running large data processing applications locally. Think of it a bit like food delivery. In
by tensor 9y ago
Saas makes sense because many large organizations are incapable of running large data processing applications locally.
Think of it a bit like food delivery. In the past each restaurant had to hire their own delivery driver and manage the delivery operation. This is highly non-trivial and as a result only a few restaurants would take on food delivery. Now, we have services that specialize in food delivery, and they service multiple different restaurants. They have the expertise on how to operate a food delivery service and so customers get consistent and good experience across a range of restaurants. It even enabled many restaurants who otherwise wouldn't have delivery to easily add food delivery to their offerings.
That's a win-win-win for all parties. Software as a service is a similar thing. It works well for large complex applications that require a team of sysadmins with application domain knowledge to run. Yes, some huge companies will take this on themselves, but much like food delivery it's not feasible for a great many companies.
- mattip 9y agoLarge companies are great at running large data processing apps. They have whole IT teams to do that. Many SAAS products are very different from food delivery, they want to access your kitchen and see all the raw ingredients going into your recipes, the excuse being “we can’t trust you to pay us what our service is worth. Well doesn’t the trust go both ways?
- garganzol 9y agoI appreciate your analogy, food delivery is a great thing to make it a service. But the source code analysis is not an inherent service. This can be done in house with a greater outcome. Win-win-win and one more win for security when running in-house. My point is that it is bad to offer exclusive SaaS solutions to non-inherently serviceable problems. This is a huge fad and delusion of nowadays.
- bastijn 9y agoActually, it is the smaller and midsized companies who benefit from shared food delivery services. The big ones can run it themselves and not have to pay the middleman. (Though in the end they will join the service again as it is not only a service to deliver food but also to index restaurants and order. So to have people pick your restaurant for delivery you have to join the google of food. But that is not important here.) Point being, enterprises happily run this locally. Either as/on their cloud on premise or on their servers. Just for our team we have 300 something servers running multiple VMs. I can easily spend a few on a solution like this to do data analysis on our repos. We already have a systems team doing only tooling (build servers, jenkins, test systems, regression dashboards etc.). This would be just another thing for their list. Having our code leave or accessed outside our premise / DMZ is much, much harder. That would pull in some very heavy discussions with the 3rd party and our legal department.
- tensor 9y agoIt's not just having the servers, but also the expertise and domain knowledge. Putting aside application specific knowledge (e.g. running SAS or the like), not all large companies have in-house expertise that can administer a Linux virtual machine. In my experience, it's not surprising to find IT departments that don't even know about ssh. Remember, there are more enterprises than technology enterprises. Finance, audit, law firms, oil and gas, insurance, these places often don't have the in-house experience to run non-Windows tech stacks.
- bastijn 9y agoBut would those companies need this service? I can hardly inagine they do.