Decided to hear what EMC is thinking about in regards to Software as a Service. SaaS is grabbing a lot of attention these days. Ameet Jani, on the Server team, is going to be sharing thoughts on how to build SaaS applications on Documentum.

• Smallest crowd to-date. I wonder how many people at the conference had heard about SaaS before attending, much-less care.
• This is a platform and technology discussion, not strategy. (Going to have to corner some people to learn more)
• SaaS Services on Exchange, not Microsoft but the new Solution Exchange I talked about yesterday.
• Traditional SaaS advantages
  • Rapid delivery: SOA services speed things up
  • Administration Ease: simple web-based administration of multiple stacks
  • License Economics: pay for what you need
  • Easy Migration of Data: SOA makes it easier (Not sold on this advantage)
  • Maintenance taken-care of behind the scenes
• Requirements of Content-centric SaaS applications
  • Pure SaaS has everything offiste
  • Pure On Premise hosts internally, keeps the critical and sensitive data onsite
  • There are mixes of having either the content or application offsite.
• Have a Salesforce.com integration where the content resides locally.
  • Links point to local repository where authentication is needed
  • This is the onsite content and offsite application SaaS model
• (He said SaaS 2.0, kill me now)
  • Talks about granting access to content in a SaaS application to external entities
• SaaS Services supplement DFS
  • Multi-tenancy: multiple users/clients using the same software with all of the users’ unique data completely protected from other users
    • Traditionally done at the application layer
    • Documentum does it through the platform (which is the right approach)
  • Security (Going to have to talk offline about this or I might sidetrack the whole presentation)
    • Authentication
    • Authorizatoin
    • SSO
    • “Web 2.0 Security” He made the term up and admits it
  • User-Provisioning
  • Configuration
• SaaS common services
  • Billing
  • Metering
  • Provisioning
  • Storage on demand
  • Deployment
• SaaS services over the next year
• SAML in Q4 2009 for SaaS (Too far away to be sure)
• (Not sold on SaaS for the Enterprise. Great for smaller companies or non-profits. This is a mild case of jumping on the bandwagon with a term. The stuff can actually do it, but I’m not sure that SaaS is the best term for how I would do this in the Enterprise. You could use the model for delivering Services to your Enterprise. This was discussed in my first session on Shared Services of the conference without the SaaS term. I’ll be talking a lot more about this later)

Time to see some demos and learn some more in the hallways.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change due to a large variety of factors.