At Ingres, we have talked a lot about our strategy for delivering IT services via 100% SaaS and open source software solutions. There has been an interesting discussion on Phil Wainewright’s blog site regarding multi-tenancy and why it matters when deploying SaaS solutions. What we seek from SaaS solutions is to get out of running our own copy of a vendor’s software, so we can then focus on strategy, vendor alignment, implementation, training, and process excellence.

In order to accomplish this, we expect our SaaS vendors to manage and upgrade the environment - a shared, multi-tenant environment in every possible case. We expect them to provide the most extensible, configurable software possible so that we can tailor it to our specific use cases, but in doing so not modify core code in the application. This is how our vendors unlock the potential of the SaaS model. This is how I know they can focus on extending their own solutions, and not become buried in managing unique customer deployments. There is a difference between this approach and the ASP world and that is why the new breed of SaaS solutions will take over the applications industry in due time.

 

Came to Ingres and Opened Up Shop

One of the reasons I was excited to join Ingres is the fact that the management team was dedicated to the idea of supplying all of our business applications via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions and everything else using open source software (OSS) solutions, including our own Ingres database. I had just gone through 2 years of painful but not uncommon downsizing effort at another company, taking IT spend from $8M down to $4M annually. I became convinced that the right way to provision IT is to maximize variable cost and get far away from large up-front capital expenditures. So I joined Ingres and we adopted a solutions sourcing strategy which included the 100% SaaS/OSS goal.

Lots of Solutions on the Menu

We started down this path with salesforce.com already in place for the sales team. We then selected Intacct Financials, and ADP’s HRIS system, all SaaS players themselves. Along the way we implemented SaaS based software from eProsper, Xactly, and others. (more…)