SaaS - Software as a Service v On-Premise v M4 Flex SaaS
During the current economic climate (credit crunch induced recession 08-09) most companies are especially keen; to improve efficiencies, to improve customer service and to reduce costs. Many companies realise that recently released business software - such as Dynamics CRM and Sharepoint provide powerful capabilities which can help them to achieve these goals. However because of the uncertain economic outlook - there is a general reluctance to make large capital investments or to enter into long term financial commitments.
Software as a Service - SaaS has received considerable attention recently (some may say hype) mainly because this software delivery model, enables organisations to quickly and conveniently gain access to the capabilities of such modern software, without having to make a large capital investments or to take on long term commitments.
However traditionally implemented SaaS does have several associated aspects, which have caused considerable concern and thus prevented widespread adoption of this model.
Because traditionally implemented SaaS is based upon a multi-tenancy architecture, companies are naturally concerned that their critical sensitive data is held within the same server and within the same application instance as multiples (could be hundreds) of other organisations. Also because the application is shared in such a manner, the application must be configured in a generic manner to suit many different types of businesses - it is much more difficult to configure or customise in amore unique fashion to suit a particular industry or company (unless the SaaS solution is industry specific but this has other downsides). The other major negative with this architecture is control and access to data - it is difficult to move the data from a shared model to a dedicated model (such as tradional on-premise) this can therefore lead to the phenomenon sometimes dubbed "my data is stuck in the cloud".
M4 Flex SaaS is a new delivery model which combines the best of both worlds - without any of the downsides of tradional hosted SaaS or tradional on premise servers.
Recent IT developments, particularly virtualisation have enabled us to develop this new model, the following paragraphs explain in detail, how we have achieved this and the benefits this can bring to our customers.
M4 launched this new product (April 09) to enable all of our customers to benefit from this type of service - with predictable, consistent, reasonable, monthly costs. A Flexible service with low risk, low start up costs plus minimal on-going commitments.
Recent viability (Spring 09) plus several years development
M4 has had many years of experience with virtualisation technologies such as VMWare and Hyper-V. We have provided and managed many dedicated servers within data centres for several of our customers such as: The London Stock Exchange, The Co-Op and Edmiston Yacht Brokers.
Our solution is based upon taking advantage of the benefits of virtualisation, it has only recently become technically viable and practical (Spring 09) following: the recent release by Intel of powerful efficient Xeon 5500 series Processors, the wide availability of Broadband, the reduction in Data Centre and Bandwidth costs, the maturation of Virtualisation technology and the availability of SPLA Software Licensing from Microsoft - a flexible subscription based model which licenses partners such as M4 to enable them to provide any software that Microsoft has built via a subscription service to our customers.
Economies of Scale
Our service enables our customers to benefit from economies of scale available as a result of large investments in IT infrastructure that have been made by M4, Microsoft and Host-IT. Such facilities would be extremely expensive and difficult, for all but the very largest (non - IT focused) organisations to replicate.
Our facility provides access to: a huge range of IT skills, very high performance hardware, unlimited telecoms bandwidth, secure data centre facilities, the latest software, the best packaged software, integration plumbing, customisation services and development services.
Rapid Deployment, Flexibility, Convenience
Customers may use this service in the manner which best suits them.
E.g. to supplement internal resource, to trial new solutions, for backup and disaster recovery purposes, for test and development purposes or for live operations.
Our Flex SaaS solution can easily plug into existing Microsoft based infrastructures enabling new applications such as Dynamics CRM to be much more rapidly deployed than would be typical 'on-premise'.
Microsoft is the world's largest R&D spender spending approx $8 Billion every building some amazing software - M4 Flex SaaS enables you to access such capability conveniently quickly reliably securely and surprisingly cheaply.
Cost Effective - Minimal Commitment
M4 Flex SaaS is very cost effective and is based upon a monthly subscription model with minimal upfront costs and minimal on-going commitments.
Capabilities, Software Products and Users can easily be added or subtracted at any time.
Best of Both Worlds
The traditional SaaS model was based on a 'multi-tenancy' rigid commodity type offering.
M4 Flex SaaS solution is much more flexible, it provides you with complete control of your data and can offer even more capability than typically available from an in-house based solution - yet it still also offers, all the benefits available from a tradional hosted solution.
i.e. with M4 Flex SaaS you get the best of both worlds.
A Software Service delivering Advanced Microsoft Software Capability to your organisation quickly conveniently reliably and securely. 
