As the hype of virtualization and cloud computing settles and becomes more useful and affordable, SaaS applications become also more accessible and viable specially to SMBs. Furthermore, with organizational limitations on sizing of IT staff, SMBs particularly can’t always afford to hire the skill set required to maintain commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications or in-house customized apps. Therefore, It only seems right that in this economy, SaaS is positioned to deliver the most value to SMBs.

This translate on hefty benefits for SBMs since with these type of solutions smaller organizations are no longer concerned with delivering software to their organizations. They are now able to deliver business applications without having to worry about maintenance and upgrades and the associated headaches of acquiring and managing the right skill set to deliver such services. Although the article below is a year old, i believe the dynamic at work is the same regarding the economy and its impact on these solutions. It’s very interesting to see their research numbers on Saas demand for the last few years. Enjoy!

Economy Benefits SaaS cloud computing

Incredible news for open source everywhere when a big customer like this is behind your product…very glad to see the success of Drupal and open source in general. Check out the full article here….

Working on a proposal for a customer I find myself with the task of finding out what is the most appropriate scalable solution for a consumer web application that could possibly go to million users easily while maintaining the development cost from skyrocketing.  On the one hand, the LAMP architecture has shown that is scalable, as per the well know documented examples of LinkedIn and Facebook.  Plus, there is no licensing to worry about when it comes to the basic components of the architecture. However, almost every piece of the functionality in that stack would have to be written from scratch and the horizontal scaling requires a lot of upkeep with mostly manual tools built almost with bare hands.

On the other hand Java technologies have developed tremendously in the last few years and in terms of processing speed and development frameworks there is almost no comparison (maybe except for .Net) However, the cost in this scenario is on the licenses for the application server and support. This only if one wants to ensure that when the rubber meets the road (like when the application server is not behaving as expected) the vendor in question will step to the plate to support your application.  This is a though decision to make but doable with today’s knowledge pool and development communities. I will keep pondering and formulating scenarios…Any thoughts on this?