Software as a service is closely related to Application Service Provider (ASP), which provides computer based services to companies over a network. Software as a Service specifically refers to software offered as a service. A more traditional model of software distribution, where a company purchases software, installs it and maintains it themselves is known as software as a product. Companies have many options when it comes to handling their software. However, software as a service has numerous benefits that should be explored.

The IT Staff is Already Busy
Employing a new technology across an entire company is very complex and very time consuming. If a company utilizes SaaS, it is much easier to roll out a new technology to a small test department, minimizing risk if it fails. However, most importantly, it won’t utilize an already overworked IT staff.

Motivation
What happens if the software or technology breaks? Your IT department, already overworked, will get to it when and if they can, depending on the needs of others in the organization and how important your issue is. In the SaaS delivery model, the vendor is very interested in keeping your business. This means that when something breaks it will get fixed right away.

Faster Installation
Since everything is running securely at the vendor’s location, companies will not need to rely on their IT departments to install an application. Not only that, but all users in the corporation will be able to have the same version of the software at the same time. You won’t need to roll it out over a period of many months.

Cost Savings
Customers pay for the software monthly in this model. This means that a company won’t need to come up with a large sum of money at one time when they want to update or add new technology and/or software for their employees. The monetary risk is much lower and companies will be more willing to take a risk when they aren’t seeing such a large sum of money leaving the company at one time.

Security
Data security can be safer when it is hosted. Frankly, it has to be secure or vendors will lose business. Security is a number one priority and data is backed up constantly. Again, with a busy IT department, it may be easy to overlook backing up or securing information.

Software as a Service is becoming a worldwide method employed by companies to service their technology needs. In a world where software is updated yearly, adding important and often business essential updates, it is no wonder companies are looking for ways to save money. Software as a Service has become a solution for companies to save money, have faster installation times, relieve an already busy IT department and ensure things are happening in a secure and timely manner. Is it for you? More and more companies will begin asking themselves that question as they look to the future of technology within their organizations.

1. Joe Devon arranged a Los Angeles
   MySQL UG meetup on April, 17th and I will be giving a short talk on Sphinx there.
2. We’ll be showing Sphinx at DotOrg
   booth at MySQL Conference 2009 on April 21st and 22nd once again, drop by booth TT12.
3. I will be giving two talks on Sphinx at Percona
   Performance Conference 2009 event co-hosted by Percona, MySQL, and O’Reilly. Those
   are preliminary scheduled on April 22nd and 23rd respectively.

I will be in LA area from April 16th to 19th, then in SF Bay area
from 20th to 28th, then off to Vegas for 3 days. Might have a free day
or two both at LA and SF, and don’t mind if you show us a secret nice
lunch place in Vegas either, so let me know
if you’d like to meet. (Slim tall blondes will be given higher priority.)

View full post on Sphinx search engine news

Software as a Service (SaaS) is method of using the software by businesses and interested parties where the software is hosted by the vendor of the software and is delivered to the customers via a web browser on Internet. The same piece of code is used by hundreds of users distributed globally and is hosted in a central location by the vendor. There are many names for this like “on-demand”, “remotely-hosted” and “Application service providers (ASP)”.

The customer who is using this service pays the vendor or host of the software on per-use basis. There is lot of hype about SaaS in the market about its advantages and disadvantages from customer’s point of view.

In this article I explain this in detail about SaaS so that you will be better informed to take a decision about SaaS.

Potential: The concept Software as a Service was first circled in the late 1990’s and since then it has gained much importance and acceptance among the users. Now, it looks like every major software company is providing such service in one form or another like antivirus software which is installed on the user’s pc and gets updated via web, or any software for that matter. According to Gartner 30 percent of New customer service and support application investments will be through SaaS model by 2012. It also predicts that all forms of SaaS-delivered customer service applications in the call center will grow by more than 20 percent per year through 2012. This shows the potential the SaaS business model has and its acceptance by the users. There is wide variety of companies involved in the SaaS business model. Although it is in existence since fairly good amount of time, it is still evolving and companies are still struggling a bit to push it into mainstream. One of the successful companies based on this model is Salesforce.com providing the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software services via the Internet.

Features:

1. No infrastructure costs: The first and foremost advantage of this model is someone hosting your software and you are saving on the upfront license and ongoing maintenance fees to run it on your own infrastructure. This is the primary reason for many companies to shift to this service.
2. No Human capital:Less human resources are needed to maintain the software running and thus saving costs. This also helps SaaS companies as they need to use fewer resources for large number of customers as the servers are located in a central location.
3. No maintainance headache and thus less risky: It is the responsibility of the vendor or service provider to keep the software and servers running it up-to-date with patches and thus provide maximum uptime and fewer overheads for the customers using the services.
4. Low cost of implementation: There is a little bit of disagreement over this among the users, as even though it looks low cost option, it may be expensive over time as you will pay for the service on an on-going basis. This is good for companies offering this kind of service as revenues are predictable and more sustained for long term thus helping them in better forecasting, planning and positioning themselves in the market.
5 Less customization: Customers using this service has less scope for customizations as they need to use the same code base used by multiple other users. Even though the companies offering these services boasts that they are highly customizable for each user according to their needs, it is not generally done in practice from my experiences.
6. Security: I have seen there are some apprehensions among customers in terms of security for their data and systems; particularly if there business-critical applications are hosted and maintained by external companies.  In such case, one can avail these services for less business-critical tasks such as partner management software, Human resources management, etc.
7. Integration and Scalability:Often it is found that these services are not easy to integrate with other applications in the enterprise. There needs to be lot of work done to integrate with other applications as each application has own set of standards and business processes. It is found that SaaS offerings are much scalable as corporations can increase the system resources based on the need of the hour and depending upon the business plans. This will help the companies to reduce on the infrastructure costs for planned for the future. Also it must be noted that sometimes as these services are not customized for each user, they need to be customized seperately to integrate it with other applications of the company and it is not a simple process. Therefore, these services are best suited for Small and Medium businesses (SMB) rather than big corporations.

The Software as a Service is available in many areas of a business like HR management, accounting, legal services, partner management, Customer Relationship management, Email, IT security and content management services. There are number of companies offering the Software as a Service today. Some of them are Salesforce.com, Oracle, Microsoft, WebEx, Citrix, SAP,GoToMeeting.

Future of SaaS:

It is exciting to see the future of the SaaS business model. Already there are signs of it becoming more and more popular as the number of companies which are providing the offerings based on it and number of customers signing up for these applications are increasing day-by-day, especially in the global economic slow down. As witnessed recently more number of big corporations are joining this party as the traditional way of using the software is becoming more of burden for customers.

The ultimate new feature couple is
MySQL binary protocol and SphinxQL
query language. Meaning that searchd can now pretend it’s mysqld.
Meaning that you can use ye good olde mysql command-line client
to connect to searchd and fire your queries using regular SELECT syntax!
More details are available via that link above.

But wait, there’s more. We added ODBC support both on Windows and Linux
(through UnixODBC) so you now can connect directly to that Oracle or
MS SQL database. We added a bunch of performance counters, IMO they look
especially nice when viewed using SHOW STATUS via mysql client program.
Strict order operator (aaa << bbb) and field-start and field-end
keyword modifiers (^hello world$) were added to full-text query language.
GROUP BY now supports aggregate functions (AVG, MAX, MIN, and SUM),
accessible both through newly added
SphinxQL interface and
SetSelect() API call.

Other 20+ features are smaller and these 7 most major ones should be
enough to encourage you to get and try it
anyway. For the curious, 0.9.9-rc2 change log
lists them all along with the bug fixes.

How safe is it to upgrade? Generally, both API and indexes are backwards
compatible (for about 2 years now); early adopters roll out intermediate
non-public releases on production systems on a rather regular basis;
and we never publish releases with known major general issues. And 0.9.9-rc2
is no exception. Of course nobody (except Donald Knuth) can guarantee
that his software is absolutely bug free. But what we can guarantee
to our customers is that we’ll priority
fix all bugs that you can repeat. (The keyword here is “priority”
as we’re gradually fixing all the bugs reports we receive.)
So if you’re looking for safer production deployment of all the shiny new
features, consider support packages. They perfectly cover 0.9.9-rc2.

What’s next? We will be fixing issues discovered in rc2 for about
1-2 months from now on before announcing stable release – depending on
your feedback. Do send us some! In the meantime, the work on real
time updates is progressing, we’ll be showing those at MySQL UC 2009.
That said, next two planned releases are 0.9.9-release and 1.10.1-alpha,
with the one which is the le… the bigger of two goods coming out first.

View full post on Sphinx search engine news

So the IT staff is overworked, phones are ringing off the hook and your email box is flooded–what to do? You can do what many financial companies are doing or have done already- connect with a <a rel=”nofollow” onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outgoing/article_exit_link’);” href=http://www.zootweb.com/additional_information/software_as_a_service.html>Software As A Service</a> (SAAS) instead of purchasing new financial software. Financial companies are looking at Software As A Service options for several benefits. Some critiques ask the question however- is customer service affected?
Benefits of Software as a Service Banking
Instead of software as a product- that each institution maintains, Software As A Service is software that is maintained by a vendor who created the software. This cuts back on issues that could come up that can’t be solved as fast as possible (should the software be managed in-house), while your company continues to deal with normal business issues, the Software As A Service vendor can either fix it remotely or travel to your business and fix the problem there. In the SaaS delivery model, the vendor is very interested in keeping your business. This means that when something breaks it will get fixed right away, rather than your in-house IT staff getting around to it.

Problems with Software as a Service Banking
One of the main complaints with Software As A Service is that banks will offer less than ideal customer service.  Since the Software As A Service usually means automated everything, customers will get frustrated.
The other issue is cost. Since Software As A Service can be costly, the cost is moved onto customers n the form of fees. Sources say costs involved in these purchases force banks to make up the costs by charging customers for every service that is offered. Customers are often penalized for defaults on payments, checking fees and other services without their knowledge. Lastly, banks using expensive Software As A Service have to invest in hardware that is compatible with the software- sometimes making it more expensive.

There are several Software As A Service options out there for financial institutions to choose from, some less expensive than others, some more customer service oriented than others too. It’s up to your financial institution to do your research and find out which one works best for you.

How Software As A Service is Changing the Banking Scene
Software As A Service transforms financial systems current credit decisioning and loan origination processes from slow and inconsistent into a dynamic automated system. Software As A Service vendor’s secure hosted environment increases the speed at which institutions can provide loans, hoping to retain customers with a better customer experience through our automated application processing and workflow software system, not lose customers.

Proponents of Software As A Service systems think that besides keeping customers, banks actually save money, get more done with less and thus providing better customer service. For instant loan origination and credit decisioning, financial institutions are seeking software as a service (SaaS) solutions for speed, reliability, scalability, and flexibility.

First, we now have a public Subversion repository. It’s a read-only
mirror hosted at Google Code, the project name is sphinxsearch.
Changes are currently svnsync’ed hourly. Likely to add a post-commit hook a bit later.
Disclaimer: I did not know we could do it that easily, only learned about
the possibility of syncing earlier today. (Thanks fly out to Alexey Vinogradov.)

Second, Eric Day made a patch that enables Sphinx support for Drizzle
- thanks a lot! Chances are we’re integrating this into 0.9.9-release, when time permits;
the patch looks fine at a glance, but I still want to review and actually try it for myself
before committing.

And third, last but not least, I just realized that Sourceforge Community
Awards 2009 are not only in progress, but actually closing nominations phase
on May 29th (if not by May 29th) ie. there’s less than two days left.
So if you feel that Sphinx is worth the Community pick, you can
vote here right now.
SysAdmins, Developers, and Enterprise all seem fitting categories to me.
Curious if we can at least make it through nominations with almost no time left;
according to CCA schedule, we’ll all know that in a month. Thanks in advance
to all voters!

View full post on Sphinx search engine news

The most major change is unarguably string attributes support.
Strings are intentionally stored in RAM, for speed. On-disk blobs are
considered in the roadmap but not yet planned. Currently strings can only
be used for storage, ie. you can fetch them, but not yet sort nor group
on them. However both sorting and grouping is perfectly technically possible,
and will be implemented at some point (enters SET NAMES).

Second-best one is in my opinion common subtree cache. It lets searchd
identify common query subparts and cache them within a query batch. So if you’re
searching for “john connor rocks” and “john connor sucks” in the same single query
batch, searchd will only search for “john connor” once, and reuse the partial result.
The feature’s currently pre-alpha, but preliminary testing already shows 2x-4x
improvement in some production scenarios.

Other forthcoming features include index precaching progress on searchd
startup, some work on rankers, query-based snippets generation, new “blended”
character class that gets indexed both as a valid character and as
a separator (think of & in AT&T); support for hitless indexes, etc.
So it’s going to be cool new alpha again.

As of 0.9.9 stable branch, a bunch of bugfixes was committed since 0.9.9-rc2
release, currently available via Google Code
public SVN mirror. No super-major affect-everyone bugs had been spotted yet, so the plan’s
to give it another round of fixing in a couple of weeks and then declare it release.

Downloads and Powered page are redesigned now, should be more usable. Everyone who
submitted the sites for Powered in the recent months, I’m sorry it’s taking
so very long to process your submissions, but unfortunately we seem to have
way too much stuff on our hands and just not enough hands to handle it all.
Your submissions are not lost forever and will be posted.

Last but not least, Sphinx made it into the second and final phase of Sourceforge
Awards 2009, in SysAdmins and Enterprise categories. (We almost made it in
Developers too.. but with an “almost”, alas.) Voting ends by July 20th,
so please vote for us, bring all your friends, and spread the link!

View full post on Sphinx search engine news

Most importantly, index merging is now much more stable.
Interesting that it’s been around for quite a while, but many bug
reports were only filed against 0.9.9 or even 0.9.10 (and then
ported back). Perhaps most of you are only adopting it now.
So note that 0.9.9-release is an officially recommended occasion
to re-evaluate merging if you were having issues with it before.

Another major change worth a mention on the front page isn’t
directly related to the code, though. Old news to those dedicated
people who follow our commits on Googlecode or
#sphinxsearch on Twitter,
and new news to everyone else, Sphinx now has official IANA assigned
ports, 9312 for native API and 9306 for SphinxQL, so update your
sphinx.conf and /etc/services. (On a side note, does anyone know what
is this appman-server thing that owns port 3312? I’m still occasionally
curious about that.)

Along with the new release today, we’re also renewing our
Consulting Services.
We’ve added a number of services such as Installation Jumpstart that,
in simple cases, can be performed within a fixed cost and time frame.
So if you require assistance with upgrading (or switching) to 0.9.9-release
then our services just got a few more options to consider. You’d expect us
to have something for early adopters and, of course, we do.
All our Support Packages will be discounted 10% off for those who
purchase our consulting services by January 31, 2010.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions regarding the services,
feel free to email us at sales@sphinxsearch.com
or call +1-888-333-1345.

And, while you’re busy upgrading, we’ll probably be busy building
1.x-alpha with incremental (real-time) updates for Christmas.

View full post on Sphinx search engine news

I would recommend downloading both products and make sure that your WSDL load up properly first. Most products choke on sophisticated WSDLs so trying that out should be your first step. Next see how easy is it to build simple test cases. Subsequently you should try more complex standards such as WS-Security, SAML,WS-Policy, etc and see which product meet your needs.Also keep all aspects of testing functional, regression, security

Cloud computing is general term used for any thing that involves delivering hosted services over the internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories

1. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
2. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
3. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Cloud has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or hour, it is elastic –a user can have as much or as little of service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider. Significant innovations in virtualization and distributed computing , as well as improved access to high speed internet and week economy have accelerated interest in cloud computing.A public Cloud can sell services to any one over the internet. Currently Amazon web services is the largest public cloud provider. A private Cloud is proprietary network  or data center that supplies hosted services to limited number of people. Infrastructure as Service (IaaS) like Amazon web services provide virtual services instances with unique IP addresses and block of storage on demand. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) in the cloud is defined as set of software and product development tools are hosted on provider infrastructure. Like salefoce.com and GoogleApps are examples of PaaS. Software-as-a-Service cloud model, the vendor supplies hardware infrastructure, the software product and interact with user through front end portal.

SaaS has been attractive, because it removes all complexity from installation, deployment, maintenance, is globally accessible and affordable. By its nature, SaaS reside in the “Cloud” and overcome the traditional headaches of VPNs for efficient collaboration. As added bonus is transparent backups (assuming there is back up strategy).SaaS is great first step towards Cloud computing  but it is also has an important draw back :Control. For all practical purposes your data is not your any more. The SaaS vendor has full control over it; can mine it and can lock you out of it. For customer, this is generally not a problem, but for the Enterprise, it is a concern. In short SaaS, the vendor is in control, not the customer. For the early days of Cloud Computing that was an acceptable compromise, but time ‘ve changed and cloud has evolved.

Cloud Software: The Evolution of Cloud Computing.

Cloud software build on cloud infrastructure. Similar to  SaaS , Clouds software provides instant gratification , taken mere minutes to be up and running. Depending on Vendor , Cloud software is easy to maintain and update as SaaS, and is of course globally accessible. First question that comes into mind “Is Cloud Software going to replace SaaS?” The answer is ‘no’ for the simple reason SaaS works well when a single machine can services 1,000 to 100,000s of individual users, such as consumer setting. In the Enterprise , however Cloud software has big advantages. The premium is gain full control over your data and your infrastructure with cloud software is simply too low to give SaaS vendors the kind of control they have enjoyed so far. High value applications will transition to Cloud Software because customer want control, While SaaS will continue to supply free or low cost applications services.

Enterprise Provisioning vs Federated Provisioning

Deprovisioning both your people from apps you don’t control or your apps from people you don’t control. It is a big issue with SaaS (Software as-a-Services) and federated provisioning. It was Burton Group’s line who said “…..there should be no reason why deprovisioning from an application like salesforce.com is any harder then deprovisioing from LDAP. And it is truth