Today, more software companies are emerging with On-Demand business solutions (also known as SaaS) that were traditionally delivered as installed products. A mere repackaging of enterprise products as On-Demand solutions is not enough; however, SaaS faces unique challenges such as:

Integration with back office applications:  SaaS solutions need to integrate with back office systems to avoid duplication of work and create consistency of data across systems. This is quite challenging because back office systems are typically behind corporate firewalls and may expose only proprietary protocols. Integration also needs to consider the fact that networks or systems might not be available occasionally.

Multiple Client support:  Ability to support multiple clients from a single instance to reduce cost of infrastructure, hosting costs, and management costs.

Performance:  Ability to support large number of users with minimal resources to derive efficiencies and economies of scale.

Security:  Hosted applications have specific security challenges as they are often publicly accessible and the risk of data theft is much higher than installed applications. In addition, a multi-tenant architecture creates additional risk as a customer may get access to another customer’s data.

Response Time:  Sub-second response time is a requirement for most SaaS applications as Internet users do not have the patience to wait for several seconds for a page to load.

Shorter release cycles and ability to enhance features: SaaS companies are expected to innovate and add features on an almost continual basis as this is a key benefit that SaaS players offer over traditional installed software.

Usability:  Today's web applications are expected to be as interactive as typical thick client applications. Technologies such as AJAX have become extremely important in this context.

Multi-browser compatibility:  Since every company has its own standard for supported browsers and operating systems, compliance with multiple browser platforms and versions is extremely important.

Manageability:  A hosted application requires infrastructure to support billing, logging, and provisioning across multiple customers.

Availability: Continuous 24/7 availability of the application requires investment in infrastructure, processes, and people.

GlobalLogic has invested in creating best practices and a framework to solve these challenges and to accelerate delivery of SaaS solutions to market.