Why resellers are waking up to OpenSaaS

One of cloud’s best kept secrets is the lack of portability for applications delivered using the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Many resellers help companies sign up for SaaS applications with the belief that it'll be easy for them to migrate to another if they need to. But that runs against the plans of the SaaS vendors, who look for long-term agreements to lock customers in by providing no exit strategy. A new model, called OpenSaas, is the answer.

OpenSaaS is software delivered as a service, with open source principles at its core. There's no lock in. When you want to leave, you export a copy of your application – code, database, and design – and move it to wherever you want.

OpenSaaS is about freedom, as in speech – or, as they say in French, “libre”. It means the option to leave has to be more valuable than actually leaving: Services have to deliver tangible value and exceed customer expectations. If it doesn't, customers will fly the coop, and rightly so.

OpenSaaS means that buyers can obtain business value from the software delivered as a cloud service, while retaining the control they'd get from running software themselves – but without investing in the hardware, resources and overhead that comes with managing a datacentre.

Why SaaS? This lack of portability has existed in software for as long as there have been incompatible file formats. However, it’s grown in the last few years with the proliferation of SaaS applications, which have introduced a complication for portability. In the old-style, self-hosted software model, you could continue using your old software as long as it ran. For SaaS applications, however, you lose the software as soon as you stop paying the host’s monthly fee.

Why use SaaS applications at all? Typically they fulfil business needs that aren't easily met in other ways, for example, for accounting, social collaboration, and customer relationship management (CRM). Often they're content management systems (CMS) or web content management systems (WCMS). In some cases the software isn't available or easy to run as a self-hosted package, making the cost and complexity of system administration prohibitive.

Sometimes companies turn to SaaS because they don't want to perform all the updates and maintenance themselves, or need to synchronise data among multiple servers. SaaS applications boast high availability rates, are easy to adopt widely throughout an organisation, and are available from almost any computer or device at any time. And they generally have a lower cost of ownership.

What’s not to love? The problem arises with proprietary SaaS applications. Because the software is owned by someone else, you usually can't make a copy of it – as you'll probably have to do to run it on your own servers. If you can’t run the software, you can't get off of the host and you're trapped.

Further, SaaS solutions are often limited in the amount of customisation that can be done. This is especially true in a multi-tenant architecture, where customisations aren't well segregated among tenants. Once you've invested, you’re invested. What will you do when your business changes or grows? How can an organisation both leverage the SaaS applications in the cloud, while still future-proofing their solution? The answer is OpenSaaS.

OpenSaaS A SaaS model enables accelerated feature delivery, as all users have access to new features the moment they’re pushed to the server. But no matter how many features a solution has, none can solve all needs. There may come a time when an organisation may need to, in essence, part ways from its provider to achieve its new goals. There is little that is more powerful than having the knowledge that when you choose your SaaS solution, you know that you have options if your requirements change.

And this, at the end of the day, provides a roadmap for scale and for change and a way to future-proof your solution, something for which proprietary SaaS vendors can't always accommodate.