Writing in the front

Every software engineer who moves to the cloud has a dream of making SaaS bigger and stronger, because it is the perfect combination of cloud and software services. What is SaaS? Compared with traditional software products, SaaS is a completely innovative software application model. For many small businesses, the best way to adopt advanced technology is without having to install traditional software procurement models (purchase, build, maintain infrastructure). It sounds like a good idea, but the road to development is not smooth.

Evolution of SaaS from 1.0 to 2.0

Like the broader IT industry, SaaS has evolved from 1.0 to 2.0. SaaS 1.0 emphasizes that all application content and functionality is provided by the software service provider itself, and this business model results in a single source of application content and functionality. Entered the stage of SaaS is 2.0, the software service providers in providing their own core of SaaS applications at the same time, will also be open to all kinds of development partners, industry partners a powerful custom ability rapid application customization platform, make these partners to use rapid configuration of the platform SaaS application of specific areas, specific industries, that is to say, By seamlessly integrating with service operators’ own SaaS applications and providing them to end enterprise users through their partners’ portal platforms and sales channels, the revenue is shared.

Current trends have the potential to make SaaS the power behind successful businesses that do not need to go directly to the end user, opting instead to stand in the background, such as facial recognition services used by some banking software.

So what are the current benefits of SaaS for enterprises? My personal summary is as follows:

  • From the technical point of view: SaaS is simple to deploy, no need to buy any hardware, simple registration and use. Enterprises can get the latest technology application without the need of IT professional and technical personnel to meet the needs of enterprise information management.
  • From the perspective of enterprise demand: the future enterprise will present the situation of elephant and flea dancing. There are a large number of small and micro enterprises like flea, they can rely on flexible strategic layout advantages to obtain a place in the market. In the context of enterprise self-organization, the business grows from the bottom up, and this requires software SaaS applications to be independently usable in the smallest units. On the one hand, the purpose of SaaS is to help users set up the application environment, correctly configure, reduce the difficulty of soft deployment, that is, to use, quickly solve the needs. On the other hand, products for small and micro enterprises should have universal one-stop function, without the redundant requirements of other departments and management, without considering cost depreciation, and without excessive attention to the selection and upgrade of software and hardware platforms.
  • From the aspect of maintenance and management: since the enterprise adopts the way of renting software business management, there is no need for special maintenance and management personnel, which greatly relieves the pressure on human and financial resources of the enterprise and enables it to concentrate funds on the effective operation of core business. SaaS enables users to be a completely independent system in the world, accessible as long as there is a network.

What about the disadvantages? I summarize the following two points:

  1. Security: Enterprises, especially large enterprises, are reluctant to use SaaS precisely because of security issues, because they want to protect their core data and do not want it to be held accountable by third parties.
  2. Standardization: SaaS solutions lack standardization. Although the industry has made some progress, there is still a lack of clear solutions for specific businesses and customization needs of users. For example, for some complex ERP products, the adoption of general SaaS products is obviously not what the end customers want.

Customers’ choice of SaaS has evolved into a fixed methodology, including the following:

  1. Comparison: The Adweek report shows that 81% of customers do a lot of research before making a choice. Compared to earlier customers, today’s customers are more interested in service usage training, local support, and even donating to a charity.
  2. Quality:For example, how soon can a service outage be repaired? Does it provide 7*24 hour customer support? The graph below shows that 69% of end users consider problem response and resolution their top priority.
  3. Long-term operations: No one wants a product they rely on to suddenly disappear.
  4. New experiences: Internet products are always evolving, as is SaaS, and end users are always looking for new products to disrupt the old ones.

We see some new trends in SaaS

SaaS is accompanied by public clouds fall to the ground and gradually rise, for traditional IT manufacturer, the first thing to solve the problem of the user’s device, or conversely, you first need to capture the user equipment, then the data, then the software service, which is why public cloud vendor’s strategy is to start from the IaaS, After having the data to do PaaS, Amazon cloud, Ali cloud is to do so. The rise of SaaS was initially to transfer the software installed locally to the cloud to solve the coordination problem in the case of multi-person collaboration within the user team, and also to save the cost of the user software License. Therefore, the initial phenomenon is more to copy the software on the original PC to the cloud, such as graphite, job tribe. These programs are directly benchmarked against Microsoft Word.

SaaS has been steadily advancing on the back of the public cloud under this business model, and SaaS has been playing a secondary role in terms of the business model of the public cloud vendors until the advent of artificial intelligence.

The technical difficulty of artificial intelligence is very high, and general IT manufacturers cannot get involved in IT quickly. Moreover, due to the importance of data for the training algorithm of ARTIFICIAL intelligence, ARTIFICIAL intelligence manufacturers are in urgent need of finding a way to collect data. Therefore, public cloud is the outlet. Let’s take a look at Tencent Cloud, a public cloud manufacturer. Compared with Amazon and Alibaba, Tencent is a little late to get involved in public cloud. Therefore, in addition to IaaS and PaaS, Tencent Cloud has been looking for other opportunities to overtake in corners, such as Tencent Youtu is one of the breakthroughs. Tencent Youtu hopes that small and medium-sized enterprises will give up their dreams of ARTIFICIAL intelligence algorithms and instead connect their applications to Tencent Youtu’s AI platform, such as facial recognition, human body recognition and other functions. For users, such SaaS services provide themselves with sophisticated AI capabilities.

In a word, the gradual stability of the public cloud provides the basis for SaaS services, the gradual offsite office mode provides user demand for SaaS services, and the rise of artificial intelligence opens up opportunities for SaaS services to directly tap the door of Internet application companies and individual developers.

At the same time, SaaS also faces some of its dilemmas

Believing that SaaS services will grow in importance as a result of this wave of AI, it’s important for us as Internet application companies and individual developers to see if there are ways to enable SaaS services ourselves, or embrace SaaS more actively. The modern way of working gives us more choices. For example, in terms of location, I can choose to write in a cafe or at home without being interrupted by other communication, because online collaboration software can already solve such problems.

But at the same time, it is also easy to find, from the point of the technical implementation, on the market at present stage collaboration platform, although can solve many people writing class writing software, but also is just writing doesn’t solve collaborative work, the coordinated management resources (files, pictures), Shared data, and so on, more comprehensive software requirements.

So this is one of the reasons why SaaS, in addition to the advantages of cost saving, easy maintenance, easy implementation and so on, faces a situation of popularity but not popularity, and this is also the gap between software and industry development. Among the many factors hindering the development of SaaS, data security is regarded as one of the major bottlenecks. After all, under the SaaS model, users’ data needs to be hosted by the SaaS service provider.

Especially for some small and micro enterprises, data security is placed in a more important position by the decision-making layer. Especially for small and micro enterprises with more diversified SaaS functional requirements, different services will face the reality of “data scattering”, low security factor and is not convenient for unified control of data. So SaaS match the local server, or using public cloud flexible advantage allows businesses to quickly build cloud services, is now a lot of small and medium-sized enterprises in the field of data storage, sharing and collaborative office a just need, to make it true hybrid cloud architecture, accelerate the network data transmission, and hybrid cloud model also let companies can selectively put high confidential data in a private cloud.

A viable path to one-stop SaaS

Slack, which once dominated SaaS services in the US, became a $3 billion unicorn by the end of 2017. Some industry insiders once concluded that “the core competition between mobile office SaaS is not about competing technologies, but who can better integrate with enterprise management and culture, and bring younger and more efficient working methods to enterprises.” In the early days of new technology pushing Internet services to the ground, such summaries are fine. Slack’s growth path is a case in point: it has built-in apis for various enterprise-class SaaS software, and integrates scattered communication methods such as email, INSTANT messaging, SMS notifications, and Intranet OA files into the session box of its operation interface, forming a large-scale tool and chat integration platform. Slack also connects to Twitter, Dropbox and Google Drive, syncs PCS with mobile devices, collaborates across departments, shares knowledge, and streams of data from other channels with a swipe of the thumb.

In keeping with the SaaS trends and bottlenecks we discussed in the previous chapter, physical IaaS is meaningless from a small and medium business needs perspective, nor is SaaS without data security. As a result, Qunhui, which started as NAS in China, began to seize the opportunity and launched its enterprise cloud service, named SkyNAS, in January this year. To put it simply, SkyNAS is the OPERATING system DSM of Qunhui. It is deployed on the server of public cloud (such as Ali Cloud), and the public cloud server configuration and bandwidth can be selected as required.

Many computer enthusiasts have a need for private data storage, hence the birth of NAS enthusiasts. NAS (Network Attached Storage) provides data access services over networks. Those who are familiar with NAS should also be familiar with the related performance of CDH and SkyNAS.

SkyNAS can share large files or remote access faster than the slow access speed of NAS Internet. In addition, there is a practical problem — a large number of small and micro enterprises do not set up special IT operation posts, so IT is difficult to build enterprise cloud, so SkyNAS sought three ways:

  • Previously, if you are the users of Qunhui physical NAS, you can synchronize important files through The cloud through SkyNAS, optimize the Internet access speed by using the line of Ali Cloud server, and quickly build a remote backup solution;
  • If the user already has Ali Cloud ECS, the user can use the diversified enterprise applications in DSM operating system on Ali Cloud ECS to build their own enterprise cloud disk;
  • For small and micro enterprise users who have neither, SkyNAS can provide enterprise cloud disk and collaborative office cloud.

SkyNAS is different from the popular perception of NAS. The goal of SkyNAS is to enable more users to experience the true convenience of cloud services, such as online capacity expansion and temporary speed increase. Although there are many similar services in the market, such as Yifang, nuts, graphite, etc., these products all have some shortcomings. Is there a platform service that can integrate these products, or package most efficiency tools in the market as one-stop service? So one of SkyNAS’s solutions is to offer web disks plus online collaboration documents, Namely, graphite document (collaboration) + Nut Cloud (web disk) + Evernote (cloud shared notes) + enterprise wechat (communication tool) + Billion square cloud (synchronization, file search, etc.) +Google Calendar (team Calendar) + Beqiaoba (chat robot).

In addition, for general users, Ali cloud ECS may be a little strange, but it is not difficult to get started. For small and micro enterprises, the cost of a few hundred yuan a month can have their own web disk and office cloud, in addition, SkyNAS solves the problem of bandwidth shortage in the case of external access (SkyNAS provides stable and fast external access, sharing large files or remote access faster). At the same time, SkyNAS runs on Ali cloud server, so data stability and security will be more guaranteed.

In other words, users can take advantage of the flexibility of SkyNAS public cloud to quickly create their own enterprise cloud space, temporarily speed up online at a low cost, and quickly expand space without even purchasing a physical hard disk. If an enterprise finds SkyNAS space insufficient, it can use Hyper Backup to Backup data to the local Synology NAS, which provides cost-effective secure storage space for cold data and large files. If the network is not working properly, the system can access the local NAS data immediately to ensure service continuity.

From the perspective of Office cloud, for example, compared with other SaaS services that only provide partial functions, SkyNAS hopes to provide relatively complete Office collaboration tools (such as Office, Calendar, Note Station, Chat), from file co-editing to shared notes and Calendar. Tools can be better interlinked (for example, you can modify, add comments, and communicate with each other directly on Office collaboration documents. In addition, Chat can be opened directly in the Office interface for instant chatting or sharing links).

In order to summarize the future development and survival dimension of SaaS, SkyNAS is a relatively complete case. In the era of no need to buy and maintain hardware, support to buy services to build NAS, data management + application function eliminates concerns about data security, stability and concentration, which should be the best solution for small and micro enterprises.

As Javier Barabas, head of IBM’s Cloud and Cognitive technology team, described SaaS: “There is no one model for all possibilities in the cloud. Enterprises should fully evaluate the cost-effectiveness and balance between their own costs and benefits, and then choose the best model. What SaaS is doing is essentially moving the workflow of business systems to the cloud.”