SAAS – Thoughts on infrastructure

Published on Zdnet: http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=105

Just as an ‘out of interest’ note, ProActive Software has an SAAS modeled solution called ProWorkflow.com. We’ve been of the opinion that it’s better to have more servers, and less users on them. We’d run about 50-100 customer accounts to a server. The upgrade and maintenance is a little more overhead, but the knowledge of knowing a large chunk of customers won’t be affected in an outage is worth it. Let’s face it, infrastructure problems will always surround the SAAS model – The issue is minimizing broad risk to customers, and having a good data integrity/recovery plan. What’s interesting is that customers take for granted that power companies, gas, phone, banks and all other co’s will have their fair share of consumer-ended problems, but they’ll always expect 100% uptime from an SAAS provider. I think as part of any SAAS’s infrastructure plan should be a plan to educate customers about the technology. If they understand the platform they’re on, they’ll be more understanding when issues arise.