3. SaaS: Location
In terms of location a SaaS Application is most readily associated with that of an internet hosted web application (and hence hosting may have been a better description in hindsight). However, in reality this only represents one of many location (hosting) models that are available including these described below:
· Remote; where the SaaS Application is hosted within the vendors IT environment and accessed by the consumer remotely.
· On-premise; where the SaaS application is hosted within the customers own IT environment and accessed locally.
· Appliance; where the vendor supplies hardware/software as a "black box" that is installed in the customer’s own IT environment, this can also include virtualized environments.
· Virtualised; a variant of the appliance model whereby the application may be hosted on the users desktop, but is isolated or virtualised using technologies such as that provided by Softgrid for example.
Several inhibitors to SaaS adoption, such as multi-tenancy, security and reliability are currently driving the evolution of some of these models. However, with the likes of application virtualisation it is conceivable that this will be an enabler in its own right for the myriad of applications that do not fit instantly into the classic internet hosted web application model.
