FROM SOFTWARE-AS-A-GOOD TO SAAS: CHALLENGES

AND NEEDS

Developing a Tool supported Methodology for the Migration of Non-SaaS

Applications to SaaS

Leire Orue-Echevarria Arrieta

, Juncal Alonso Ibarra

, Jan Gottschick

and Hannes Restel

Tecnalia Research & Innovation, ICT-ESI, Parque Tecnológico de Bizkaia, Geldo Street, Zamudio, Spain

Fraunhofer-Institut fur Software und Systemtechnik ISST, Berlin, Germany

Keywords: Software engineering methods, Software-as-a-service, Platform-as-a-service, Cloud computing, Business

models, Internet of services, SOA, Migration methodologies.

Abstract: For all software vendors, but especially small and medium ones and in the current downturn economic

situation with such a high competition, businesses that are not prepared to migrate the offerings of their

software solutions to the form of online-services not only miss the opportunity to acquire new customers but

they also run the risk of losing their existing customers towards new competitors. This transition from a

software-as-a-good approach to a software-as-a-service one, is not trivial at all, and there exists a real

demand for proven methods to perform the transition from traditional software products to the service

concept. Based on this premise, the objective of this position paper is to provide software organizations with

a stepwise procedure, methods and tools to migrate non-SaaS applications into SaaS, taking into account not

only technical and technological issues but also issues related to business models and how to monetize the

final solution. The solution presented here is a theoretical approach that is currently being validated in eight

use cases in the Basque Country.

1 INTRODUCTION

In the course of establishing Cloud Computing

concepts and with the inherent build up of service

infrastructures, generic software products are

increasingly being offered as individually

configurable services in the form of Software-as-a-

Service (SaaS) over the Internet.

As these new technologies emerge, a transition

of business models is taking place: more and more

software vendors are changing their business models

from the Software-as-a-Good (SaaG) principle to the

SaaS principle. According to a study commissioned

by the EC in 2009 (Giron et al., 2009), SaaS market

sales are expected to increase by approximately 20%

per year, reaching 7,000 M€ in 2012 for EU27.

All in all, the transition from the traditional SaaG

approach to the SaaS world is not trivial at all, and

an actual demand exists for proven methods to

support the transition from traditional software

products to the service concept. Some of the

problems encountered by software vendors,

especially SMEs, in this transition activities include

among all, the determination of a correct business

model, a pricing model, automatic billing, users’

activity monitoring and auditing and service

provisioning.

This position paper argues for the necessity of a

migration method that pursues to solve the issues

above and introduces the description of a tool

supported method for the migration of non-SaaS

applications (legacy applications, partial or

complete, packaged software, Software-as-a-Good)

to SaaS, in order to support all companies, but

especially SMEs, in successfully migrating their

traditional business model to a SaaS-based business

model. Some parts of the approach presented here

are currently being validated in several companies in

the Basque Country. While it is still too early to

determine the correctness of the approach, no major

shortcomings of it were encountered.

257

Orue-Echevarria Arrieta L., Alonso Ibarra J., Gottschick J. and Restel H..

FROM SOFTWARE-AS-A-GOOD TO SAAS: CHALLENGES AND NEEDS - Developing a Tool supported Methodology for the Migration of Non-SaaS

Applications to SaaS.

DOI: 10.5220/0003444002570260

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Software and Database Technologies (ICSOFT-2011), pages 257-260

ISBN: 978-989-8425-77-5

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

2 A GLOBAL MIGRATION

APPROACH: FROM

TECHNOLOGY TO BUSINESS

The transition from a traditional software

development and delivery model to the SaaS world

is proving to be not trivial and many changes are

therefore needed to accomplish both the technical

and business side of SaaS.

This double migration is complicated and an

overall systematic and standardized approach is not

publicly available. Thus, companies humbly face the

decision of which existing technology to migrate to

and via which distribution channels to make it

available, without risking the sustainability of their

business. Nevertheless, a stand-alone method is not

sufficient, which means that supporting calculation

tools are essential. These tools shall at least cover

the calculation of the running costs for SaaS

solutions as well as the calculation of the income

expected from such offers, while considering also

additional and numerous factors, which can be

levied only based on the choice of a specific

platform.

2.1 Current Situation

While transforming an application to SaaS, many

issues need to be taken into account. Technically,

SaaS applications are built up from SOA. That is, all

SaaS applications are based on SOA, while not all

SOA applications are SaaS.

Transforming legacy applications to a service

based approach allows systems to remain mostly

invariable while exposing functionalities to a large

number of customers through well-defined service

interfaces. Some migration strategies to SOA, by

wrapping components or modules as Web Services

may be relatively straightforward but in the long

term not efficient. Characteristics such as platform,

language, architecture and the target environment

play an important role in this complicated task.

Some proposals for legacy migration to SOA like

SMART (Grace, et al., 2008), or IBM SOMA

(Kishore, et al., 2004) are available on literature. In

spite of approaching the problem from different

points of view, they all share some common aspects

but also shortcomings. These shortcomings appear

mainly in the way in which they treat

interoperability, reliability, QoS, SLA Management,

scalability, configurability and multitenancy, basic

issues in the development of a SaaS application. Of

course, several commercial solutions, such as

Oracle’s (Davies et al., 2009), do tackle these

problems in their tool-suites but they lack of an

independent and holistic method to prepare

companies to a SOA and SaaS migration, where

both requirements of current legacy systems and

business needs have to be considered to establish a

successful migration strategy.

The consequence of these shortcomings and

vendor-lock-in causes that most companies, when

trying to migrate their application to SaaS, start from

scratch putting up a high investment with little

security that the product, offered as a service, will be

accepted by their current customer spectrum.

Needless to say, that none of the aforementioned

methods cover the business requirements that SaaS

applications require.

The next sections describe a method that

provides a solution to the problems expressed above.

2.2 Approach

Thus, as expressed above, when transforming a

product-based company into a SaaS provider, more

than just a few technical issues have to be dealt with.

Most prominently, the company has to change its

business model for that particular product, while

trying to make it coexist at the same time, with other

products’ business models. This situation will surely

change its whole culture and processes. Therefore, it

is needed a procedure model, which helps

enterprises improve their technical know-how in

order to migrate their software to cloud computing

platforms as well as to supply them with methods

and principles with respect to developing a SaaS-

ready business model. The proposed solution in this

position paper mainly consists on having a holistic

view of the problem backing it with various tools,

which support the migration to improved business

models and sophisticated technical platforms in a

safe way.

The proposed approach introduces some innovative

points which are not being tackled in current

existing solutions:

- Holistic focus mixing technological

challenges and business related aspects.

- Stepwise approximation to the problem

enabling the coexistence of both business

models (SaaG/SaaS), minimizing failure

risks

- Complete technical scope including current

needs related to Cloud Computing

challenges

Following, the envisioned approach is shown:

ICSOFT 2011 - 6th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies

258

Migration Methodology

Technical &

Technological

Business

Legacy System

Cloud Providers

QoS, SLA, APIs…

Service-oriented

company

Business models

Business

development plan

Migration Assessment Tools

- Impact of business changes

- Effort of changes and # actions

to migrate

- ROI and payback

Business model

Technology model

Migration Strategy

Migration

implementation

Availability

Security

Performance

SLAs

QoS

Metering &Billing

Billing Engine

Pricing Engine

Metering

Provisioning

Order Management

Monitoring

Customer support

ECOSYSTEM

How do I reach the

targeted situation

(2)?

Where am I in the quadrant?

Other

….

Migration Methodology

Technical &

Technological

Business

Legacy System

Cloud Providers

QoS, SLA, APIs…

Service-oriented

company

Business models

Business

development plan

Migration Assessment Tools

- Impact of business changes

- Effort of changes and # actions

to migrate

- ROI and payback

Business model

Technology model

Migration Strategy

Migration

implementation

Availability

Security

Performance

SLAs

QoS

Metering &Billing

Billing Engine

Pricing Engine

Metering

Provisioning

Order Management

Monitoring

Customer support

ECOSYSTEM

How do I reach the

targeted situation

(2)?

Where am I in the quadrant?

Other

….

Migration Methodology

Technical &

Technological

Business

Legacy System

Cloud Providers

QoS, SLA, APIs…

Service-oriented

company

Business models

Business

development plan

Migration Assessment Tools

- Impact of business changes

- Effort of changes and # actions

to migrate

- ROI and payback

Business model

Technology model

Business model

Technology model

Migration Strategy

Migration

implementation

Availability

Security

Performance

SLAs

QoS

Availability

Security

Performance

SLAs

QoS

Metering &Billing

Billing Engine

Pricing Engine

Metering

Provisioning

Order Management

Monitoring

Customer support

ECOSYSTEM

How do I reach the

targeted situation

(2)?

Where am I in the quadrant?

Other

….

Figure 1: Solution overview.

2.3 Proposed Solution

Following the needs and challenges foreseen in the

previous sections, the proposed approach will

provide a twofold (tool-supported) methodology

consisting on 1) tools to assess the impact, cost,

effort, ROI and payback that a migration implies and

2) stepwise procedure with tailoring strategies

supported by a SaaS ecosystem to migrate legacy

software to a service oriented paradigm taking into

account SaaS basic concepts.

2.3.1 Assessing the SaaS Readiness of a

Company: A SaaS Migration

Methodology

A company striving to improve its position in the

market has to know very clearly where it stands and

where it wants to go. Therefore, a benchmark, which

allows a company to measure its position in the SaaS

market is needed. The main idea is that if the actual

characteristics of a company’s solution in the SaaS

market can be identified and measured, the actions

required to improve the current characteristics rated

as weak can be derived. The SaaS market demands a

move to state-of-the-art technologies like SOA and

cloud computing in the back office as well as web-

based user interfaces and applications maintainable

in as simple a manner as possible. Beyond the pure

technological changes, the exploitation and

implementation of the improved business model in

the new context of SaaS is a key factor of success. It

is important to notice that there does not exist a

single path to a successful repositioning, as both the

preconditions and environment of companies differ.

Such an approach of benchmarking a company (or

one of its products) and determining the required

improvements has been successfully adopted using

balanced scorecards (Cobbold, I et al., 2002) to

define IT strategies in large enterprises. The figure 2

below outlines the evaluation of a company’s

position using a quadrant. Similar to the evaluation

of quality criteria as motivated by the ISO 9126

quality model standard (ISO, 2011) and used in the

methodology of the “bidirectional quality model”

(Simon, F., et al., 2006) the approach will measure

several metrics by evaluating check lists or

analysing features of the existing software. The

measured metrics are aggregated to indicators,

which define a characteristic used to calculate the

maturity of the business model and the maturity of

the technology model. The pricing model constitutes

one possible candidate (but not the only one) for a

typical characteristic of the business model. An

example for a characteristic of the technology model

is given by the usage of a service-oriented

architecture in the existing technical solution.



Figure 2: Quadrant approach.

2.3.2 Migration Assessment Tools

Furthermore, tools to help companies in the decision

process of whether to migrate or not are needed.

These tools comprise the following ones:

 Impact of Business Changes

: tool to measure

how the business model of the migrated

solution will impact the overall results of the

SME as a whole, compared to the situation in

which the product is not migrated.

 Effort of Changes and Required Actions to

Migrate: This tool should analyse code

patterns, how coupled the code is and from

there, calculate how many actions will be

required to migrate the code and how much

effort they will cost. Monetization of the effort

can easily be derived.

 Calculation of ROI and Payback

: This tool

should calculate the return of investment and

FROM SOFTWARE-AS-A-GOOD TO SAAS: CHALLENGES AND NEEDS - Developing a Tool supported

Methodology for the Migration of Non-SaaS Applications to SaaS

259

payback, taken into account as entry

parameters how much the migration will cost,

and the expected benefits.

2.3.3 Migration Implementation Resources

To support the migration strategy and speed up the

migration process, it is necessary to create and make

available to these companies an ecosystem of

standard solution components and services. These

components shall include at least those related to

how to monetize a SaaS application (i.e. a billing

engine, a pricing engine), performance monitoring,

security techniques, auditing, mechanisms to

measure and monitor QoS, and SLA management.

3 CONCLUSIONS

For an organization trying to get involved and take

advantage of the undergoing technological wave

under the Internet-of-Services paradigm, the

migration to SaaS is an important challenge to face.

Current solutions mainly concentrate on the

technological aspect of the SOA approach but lack

in the business and organizational aspects.

Furthermore, most of the existing propositions tackle

this situation with a big bang approach vision

proposing solutions based on migration from scratch

rather than a stepwise-risk minimizing procedure.

To face these challenges, a complete solution is

needed, including key features like:

 A benchmarking tool to assess the maturity of

the current and desired business model as well

as the maturity of the established and desired

technologies.

 A risk minimized, stepwise procedure model,

that envisions all applicable directions and

options to SMEs for the next step to go,

especially the financial and business

implications to be expected, and the overall

impact for the technical and business

improvement in comparison to the state-of-

the-art.

 Tools to calculate the impacts of core issues,

e.g. to calculate the impacts of changing the

existing pricing model from a product-based

solution to alternative business models

(simple, composite or hybrid).

 A catalogue of essential services and

components needed to develop and deploy a

successful and sustainable SaaS application.

The theoretical solution presented in this position

paper will bridge the transition towards the new era

of Internet of Services providing methods and

criteria that will enable important breakthroughs in

software engineering methods and architectures,

allowing flexible, dynamic, dependable and scalable

provision and consumption of advanced SaaS

applications.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The work presented in this paper is partly financed

in the project SMARTWORK funded by the Basque

Government under the Etorgai funding programme.

REFERENCES

Davies, J., Shaffer, D., Demed, L., 2009. Oracle SOA

Suite 11g. Available at: http://www.oracle.com/

technetwork/middleware/soasuite/overview/wp-soa-

suite-11gr1-2-129551.pdf.

Giron, F. et al., 2009. D2 – The European Software

Industry - Economic and Social Impact of Software &

Software-Based Services, Paris, France: Pierre Audoin

Consultants SAS (PAC). Available at:

http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai/docs/20090730-d2-

eu-ssbs-industry_en.pdf.

Grace A. L., Edwin J. M, Dennis B. S, Soumya S., 2008.

SMART: Analyzing the Reuse Potential of Legacy

Components in a Service-Oriented Architecture

Environment, Carnegie Mellon University. Available

at: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/reports/08tn008.pdf.

Kishore C., Kerrie H., Edward M., 2004. Migrating to a

service-oriented architecture. IBM Global Services &

IBM Software Group. Available at:

ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/s390/audio/pdfs/G224-

7298-00_FinalMigratetoSOA.pdf.

Simon, F., Seng, O., Mohaupt, T., 2006. Code-Quality-

Management - Technische Qualität industrieller

Softwaresysteme transparent und vergleichbar

gemacht. dpunkt Verlag, Heidelberg.

Cobbold, I et al., 2002. The Development of the Balanced

Scorecard as a Strategic Management Tool. Available

at: http://www.2gc.co.uk/pdf/2GC-PMA02-1f.pdf

ISO, 2011. Software engineering -- Product quality -- Part

1: Quality model. http://www.iso.org/iso/

iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csn

umber=22749

ICSOFT 2011 - 6th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies

260