Messaging News - December 2008 - (Page 11) hing Pennies with SaaS by Stephanie Jordan s companies layoff employees and look to cut expenses in response to the economic downturn, a growing tactic embraced by IT departments is to explore the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. “More customers are open to SaaS in today’s economic climate,” acknowledges Timothy Eades, CEO of Everyone.net. “It becomes a no-brainer once the customer is satisfied that a SaaS solution is as good or better than an in-house solution. Products such as Microsoft Exchange that are high priced and sometimes complicated to maintain are crying out to be replaced by a SaaS company.” Marc Briceno, director of business development for PGP Corporation observes, “PGP Corporation and our resellers have seen clear signs over the last 18 months that the SaaS delivery model is becoming increasingly adopted by both SMB and enterprise customers.” Briceno notes that SaaS offers lower up-front investment in both capital expenditures and staff time. “The SaaS delivery model provides a faster path to deployment, which has been a key driver with our SaaS customers to reduce capital expenditures and provide cost-saving with their technology investments. We expect to A see more SaaS deployments and the pay-as-you-go models, if the current macroeconomic climate continues.” While the SaaS model is certainly not new, this trend is gaining momentum as a means to save money during these unprecedented times. Mary Kay Roberto, senior vice president and general manager of Mimecast U.S. discloses, “We have clients that have seen reductions of costs in some cases between 60 and 80 percent in what they had anticipated expending on an alternative on premise solution. We definitely are seeing economic conditions driving people to a SaaS model/ approach. It is very attractive in the current economic climate.” What Exactly Is SaaS? There is a lot of talk about “cloud” computing often being used interchangeably with the term SaaS. It is interesting to note that these terms mean different things to different people. According to IDC cloudbased software, as well as SaaS and hosted messaging security are “essentially variations of the same thing; such software is characterized by the software, services, and support offerings that are specifically built and designed for one-to-many delivery over the Internet.” Briceno explains the differences in this way, “SaaS generally implies a contractual relationship between the enterprise and an external SaaS provider for a specific application. PGP Corporation’s applications delivered to the end-user through partner members of the PGP Managed Service Provider Network (MSPN) are such an example of a SaaS offering. Cloud computing focuses more on infrastructure and data rather than application delivery. Cloud computing can be hosted both internally and externally for an enterprise. For example, with the rise of virtualization some enterprises are providing rapid desktop and workstation provisioning using an internal computing cloud.” Another definition is offered by Eades, who says “Everyone.net defines SaaS as a multi-tenant, unit of use product model and ‘cloud computing’ as a paradigm in which data is stored permanently on the Internet, but temporarily cached on local clients such as a Web browser.” While there is no pinpoint agreement, what is for sure is the growth of this segment. According to IDC, the market for hosted messaging services will increase from $443 million USD in 2007 to nearly $1.750 messagingnews.com 11 http://www.Everyone.net http://www.Everyone.net http://www.messagingnews.com
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