What Is Archibus Enterprise SaaS?
Archibus Enterprise SaaS
At AHS we often get asked about the characteristics of our Archibus Enterprise SaaS solution. Although businesses have been using the Cloud since the 1990s, there can still be a lack of clarity in terms of the terminology in the marketplace even now. A good place to start is to define Archibus Enterprise SaaS.
Archibus Enterprise SaaS is more than traditional SaaS. It compiles the main aspects of why businesses generally choose SaaS solutions – lower upfront costs, fewer resources required, high scalability, easy to update, quick and fairly simple deployment, etc. – with the great additional features of full customizability and maximum control usually reserved only for on-premises solutions.
What is SaaS?
But what is SaaS? Is it all the same? Terms like SaaS (Software as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) tend to confuse matters. Add to this additional acronyms and terms like on-premise, hosting, etc. and stakeholders suddenly find that they are viewing a complex landscape.
So let us deconstruct what we mean by “SaaS”.
To be precise, SaaS is short for “Software as a Service”,. This means that the software is hosted remotely and accessible from the internet. Everything that the customer requires is already included and ready to be used, it is available 24/7,. The customer pays as they go.
This classic model like your typical Salesforce, Office 365 or Adobe SaaS is deployed in a environment which is the most cost-effective solution for the vendor. In this model tenants (clients) share the hosting infrastructure, which allows direct benefits from the economy of scale. It means all users get identical software functionality. In this case classic SaaS means that it is a non-customizable solution. What’s more, integration and data exchange are subject to staging, if indeed they are possible at all in the public cloud. If we adopted this model of SaaS, then we would be limited to delivering the very same Archibus to all customers with the same features and no adaptations.
Archibus Enterprise Saas – for Partners and their Clients
For Archibus’ customers and partners, the requirement can be quite different,. Most of them require some sort of customization regarding functionality and integrations with other hosts. Additionally, clients want their Archibus to be in a private environment rather than a public Cloud. This is the reason why Archibus Enterprise SaaS was created in 2007. Imagine all the utility of having Archibus in your own network. But then with someone else taking the strain of managing the risk around the infrastructure and delivery. That “someone’ is Archibus Hosting Services.
What’s more, our Archibus Enterprise SaaS model really suits the relationship that is formed between our partners and their clients. This relationship is based on partnership and delivering a vision of the future development of the solution. Often, real time access to the technology and the ability to customise and integrate whilst eliminating costly intermediary steps are the key to delivering on this relationship.
So Archibus Enterprise SaaS is specifically designed to provide Archibus with all the advantages of SaaS. Our clients all benefit from reduced and more predictable costs, no need for asset management and other resources, ease of deployment and compliance around cyber security and information security.
A key element of our solution that may not be present in a standard Saas deployment is our Management Layer. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post that will explain why our unique approach to managing Archibus deployments in the Cloud is so successful.