We reported on these pages yesterday when integrated application solutions provider Radware Ltd. told us during an interview that it’s eyeing a focus on virtualization as it finalizes an $18 million purchase of Nortel Networks Corp.’s Layer 4-7 application delivery business.
And it seemed like all through March we were hearing about companies leveraging the Software-as-a-Service, or “SaaS (News - Alert)” model to cut costs and boost productivity. One report emerged predicting that the SaaS market will double by 2012 from $6.4 billion last year, while another study said that the U.S. government could save billions by moving to more open source software, virtualization and cloud computing.
This week, those kinds of expectations are getting finer point in a new report from a Waller, Texas-based open source software community.
According to officials at click2try, technologies such as SaaS, virtualization, open source software, low-power processors, cloud computing and managed hosting are poised to play a critical role as the economic recession, government regulations and global competition force CIOs and other executives to tighten their belts and find ways to make their workforces more productive.
The report – titled “The Future Is Here: Critical Convergence (News - Alert) in IT Technology Solutions” – says decision-makers can continue to make reactive and costly choices, or they can use information at hand to make proactive technology choices that can help stimulate innovation and address cost containment and environmental issues at the same time.
According to click2try’s president, Mario Grech, it’s critical to help IT professionals cut through the chatter and come to a more unified approach to market trends.
“It seems like there are a dozen new challenges and 15 technologies to address them every day,” Grech said. “How’s the CIO or IT manager supposed to make sense of it all?”
Take SaaS, for example. The technology has matured from its early roots in the application service provider model of the late 1990s, the report says, into a formidable movement.
“Characterized by a recurring license model (subscription), SaaS software gives IT departments flexibility when it comes to deploying a SaaS application,” the report says. “Users access most SaaS applications over a secure VPN tunnel more frequently accessible from behind the user’s corporate firewall.”
According to Daniel Druker, a senior vice president at Intacct Corporation, “SaaS typically offers far better IT operations infrastructure capabilities and service levels than any but the largest enterprises can afford to deliver on their own.”
Yet as of now, except for a few office productivity suites, applications are delivered and managed on a per-vendor basis, according to click2try.
“This amounts to a traditional model in one sense: erecting functional silos that require an onsite contact for whom part or all of the workday is dedicated to managing that application for one or more departments,” the Web community says in its report.
Similar breakdowns of open source, virtualization and other cost-saving technologies can be found in the free report, here.
Tom Callaghan, vice president of technical operations at click2try, said that too often, IT departments get stuck with the dirty work of cost cutting and decreasing service levels.
“We see ways to cut costs and increase service levels,” he said. “And that should help stimulate innovation in IT and out into other areas of the enterprise.”