Development vs. Delivery Platforms for SaaS

A new study by McKinsey & Company published this week talks up the impending battle between SaaS development and SaaS delivery platforms.

The SaaS development platform is essentially a turnkey application development platform, including runtime, database, hosting, development tools, common UI, hosting, etc.  Companies in this space are Force.com, Bungee Labs, Longjump, Coghead, and likely many others to come.

The SaaS delivery platform combines all the element necessary to deploy and administer a SaaS offering, and solve many of the ornery and expensive elements like billing and metering across multiple offerings, single sign-on, service provisioning, service monitoring, infrastructure scalability, application integration, etc.  This is a great option for APs who have made a commitment and investment in their application and don't want to re-write.  Some players in the industry today are OpSource, Amazon (EC2 and S3) although this is not a complete offering, and likely to be others as the hosting providers in the market realize that simple Linux or Microsoft hosting isn't enough and they move to offer more valuable and integrated services.

Assuming for the moment that you see the market evolving in this way as well, what path would you take?  Do you see something different?

Comments

[delivery service philippines]

"The SaaS delivery platform combines all the element necessary to deploy and administer a SaaS offering, and solve many of the ornery and expensive elements like billing and metering across multiple offerings, single sign-on, service provisioning, service monitoring, infrastructure scalability, application integration, etc. " Thank's for this information,this is the delivery platform that i've been looking for, Keep up the good work.

by:missy

[SaaS Consulting]

A SaaS Development Platform should have built-in multi-tenancy, web controls, pre-built components, etc. SaaS Development Platforms and SaaS Deployment Platforms are fundamentally different.