OpSource™ provides enterprise-class Cloud and SaaS hosting & services for Fortune 1000, Software-as-a-Service and Web companies. By choosing OpSource, we are free to focus our resources on building our business rather than investing in and running IT infrastructure and support services.

OpSource On-Demand empowers us to bring enterprise-class SaaS and Web solutions to our end-users quickly and securely. Including, but going far beyond traditional managed hosting, this comprehensive, award-winning solution incorporates the application and data operations, compliance and business services that are necessary for on-demand business success.


With complete infrastructure, 24x7 staff and operations best practices built through years of experience, OpSource delivers applications over the web. By choosing OpSource, we are freed from investing in and managing complex and costly infrastructure and can instead focus on our core competencies - developing, marketing and selling our software solution.

The OpSource On-Demand SaaS Hosting solution encompasses three key components rolled into the perfect SaaS platform.

At the core, allowing for scalable web delivery...

• Managed Hosting and Cloud

• All hardware, software and systems infrastructure
• Dedicated or virtual server technology, according to our needs and wants
• World-class Tier 4 data center facilities
• Redundant carrier-class load balancing architecture
• In-depth 24x7 monitoring, security and management procedures backed by SAS-70 Type II audit
• Built-in high availability solutions from simple clustering to wide-area Disaster Recovery

Next, providing the resources and solutions to ensure the best end user experience..

Application and Data Operations

• Data Management: From physical infrastructure through the Oracle, MySQL, or SqlServer database - all the way to our application itself
• Performance Management: Infrastructure performance and how your application actually performs in the wide area - Authenticated by Gomez
• Change Management: Ensure our application changes work every time
• Compliance: SAS 70 Type II, PCI DSS Level 1, European Safe Harbor - even our specific compliance needs
• Application Optimization: From ad-hoc troubleshooting to full audits, ensuring our application scales

For more info, please visit:

http://www.opsource.net

Software as a service (SaaS) is a model of software deployment over the internet. With SaaS, a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand, either through a time subscription or a “pay-as-you-go” model. Also known as “software on demand,” the SaaS model allows vendors to develop, host and operate software for customer use. Rather than purchase the hardware and software to run an application, customers need only a computer or a server to download the application and internet access to run the software. The software can be licensed for a single user or for a group of users.

SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or upload the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. While SaaS was widely deployed initially for sales force automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), its use has become commonplace by businesses for tasks such as computerized billing, invoicing, human resource management, service desk management, and sales pipeline management, among others, according to a January 2010 Information Week article.

Philosophy

As a term, SaaS is generally associated by software professionals and business associates with business software and is typically thought of as a low-cost way for businesses to obtain rights to use software as needed versus licensing all devices with all applications. On-demand licensing enables the benefits of commercially licensed use without the associated complexity and potential high initial cost of equipping every device with the applications that are only used when needed.

For example, a licensed copy of a word processor, had to reside on the machine to create a document. The equipped program has no intrinsic value loaded on a computer that is turned off for the night. Worse yet, the same employee may need another fully paid license to write or edit a report at home on their own computer, while the work license is inoperative. SaaS achieves efficiencies by enabling the on demand licensing and management of the information and output, independent of the hardware and user location.

SaaS applications differ from earlier applications delivered over the Internet in that SaaS solutions were developed specifically to leverage web technologies such as the browser, thereby making them web-native. The data design and architecture of SaaS applications are specifically built with a 'multi-tenant' backend, thus enabling multiple customers or users to access a shared data model. This further differentiates SaaS from client/server or 'ASP' (Application Service Provider) solutions in that SaaS providers leverage enormous economies of scale in deployment, management, and support throughout the Software Development Lifecycle.

Key characteristics

Characteristics of SaaS include:

• Network-based access to, and management of, commercially available software

• activities managed from central locations rather than at each customer's site, enabling customers to access applications remotely via the Web. Application delivery is typically closer to a one-to-many model (single instance, multi-tenant architecture) than to a one-to-one model, including architecture, pricing, partnering, and management characteristics centralized feature updating, which obviates the need for end-users to download patches and upgrades.

• Frequent integration into a larger network of communicating software - either as part of a mashup or as a plugin to a platform as a service. (Service oriented architecture is naturally more complex than traditional models of software deployment.)

• Providers of SaaS generally price applications on a per-user basis, sometimes with a relatively small minimum number of users and often with additional fees for extra bandwidth and storage. SaaS revenue streams to the vendor are therefore lower initially than traditional software license fees, but are also recurring, and therefore viewed as more predictable, much like maintenance fees for licensed software.

In addition to the characteristics mentioned above, SaaS software has these additional benefits:

• More feature requests from users since there is frequently no marginal cost for requesting new features;

• Faster releases of new features since the entire community of users benefits from new functionality; and

• The embodiment of recognized best practices — since the community of users drives the software publisher to support best practice.