The Product-as-a-Service project aims at answering questions related to the transition of traditional on-premise software products to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment. Software product vendors encounter a lot of problems when their customized on-premise software products to a SaaS environment and stuggle with compliance to customers requirements, scalability and maintainability. The problems encountered by software vendors will be assessed from both a technical (Utrecht University) and business (University of Groningen) point of view.
The key research issue of the technical side of the PaaS project is runtime configuration management in large scale customized multi-tenant installations.
Multitenancy entails serving multiple customers from one container running a single instance of an application. Tenancy allows the application to present itself to the customer as a service, thereby reducing the Total Cost of Ownership for the customer. The product software-vendor is now able to maintain his code base in a single place. This brings forth the challenge how to cater for multiple customizations in a single code base. This is done by using a dynamic architecture that gets instantiated as domain decisions are made.
Questions asked within this research are:
- How to handle the fact that these services are not just downloaded as files to customers, but that these customers have to be served in runtime?
- How to deal with the fact that the customers potentially all have different customized services?
- How to allow upgrades from the supplier services in runtime? How to allow customers to change their services in runtime, while preserving their precious data?
- How to serve consumers rather than business customers?
- How can third-parties extend services, while maintaining integrity and reliability of the platform service?
For all these questions intuitive technical solutions are available, but a thorough scientific study into the architectural consequences of technical options has been lacking. This is the scientific niche we aim to explore.
From a business point of view, traditionally, vendors of product software and service providing organizations have been in separated industries, following separate business models. The (r)evolution of information and communication technologies (ICTs) enables companies from two industries to pursue a common business model, Software as a Service (SaaS). The convergence of these models is accelerating and rising to the forefront. Organizations will have to use the best practices from both of these worlds to strategically handle new forms of competition during this phenomenon. Accordingly, the project involves organizations who are forerunners in moving towards a SaaS business model, including two product software companies, Exact and AfAS, which are main players in the software market sectors of financial services and business applications.
Due to its novelty, scant literature currently exists on this quickly developing phenomenon. The first goal is to obtain generalized knowledge from other industries that have experienced convergence via an intensive literature review and case studies to evaluate models that could be potentially be applied to the processes of software and service companies, which of course are very different in nature. Based on these findings, the next goal is to devise a model that will be tested in real world scenarios in two service chains, financial and government services. A final goal is that these results help service and software companies better prepare for the business and organizational challenges that arise out of this convergence.