Information Week has a really interesting article about Jive Software's approach to eschew the typical multi-tenant SaaS model in favor of a virtualized hybrid (private<->public) cloud implementation on Amazon's EC2.
According to the article, the view suggested by Chris Morace, Jive's SVP, Products is that multi-tenancy SaaS is too limited. The idea of a federated, hybrid cloud approach will enable flexibility in the deployment of a solution - whether it's deployed in part or whole in either private or public cloud shouldn't matter.
"We do ultimately believe that if you fast forward, everyone will be on a cloud, whether private or public," says Morace. "The efficiencies and economics make too much sense not to happen."
First, I'm not sure that the economics for cloud services always make sense for all SaaS vendors or software ISVs. In speaking to a few CTOs/CIOs on cloud services, I've found that the greatest economic benefit is in storage, not computational resources. Also, cost is only one part of the equation - for many business critical SaaS vendors (and all SaaS vendors like to think themselves as business critical), guaranteed service level is a big issue as well.
Second, the issues cited in the article as data co-mingling and infrastructure lock-in in the multi-tenant SaaS model is misleading. This isn't universally a SaaS issue, it's a result of how SaaS architecture is implemented. For instance, at Eloqua, we offer multi-tenancy SaaS and yet provide data separation in our SaaS architecture - they aren't mutually exclusive.
What do you think - are you buying the benefits of this hybrid cloud model? Is this going to lead to a post-SaaS future?
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