The most leading genres of Software applications in present day market is CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications a wide range of open source technology ranges from low to high expenditure.
Cloud has been a buzz word for quite some time now. If you are not an organization which is already on cloud, you are going to be the one soon. But what exactly the cloud is all about and how it is different from SaaS, has been quite confusing for companies and both the words have been used quite interchangeably, so what the real difference is:
Cloud is a metaphor of Internet through which a service provider virtually provides
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for the end users to use an application.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for the technical folks to develop an application.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for an organization to use infrastructure.
From both cloud vendor and a cloud client ’s point of view- The true leverage and cost effectiveness of Cloud based services lies in the maximizing the utilization of resources. If a vendor is providing these services to an organization through internet but without sharing it with anyone else, it is not a cloud nor is it cost effective for either of them. This service is nothing more than a web based application much like an ASP one.
Different cloud customers use their own versions (an instance) of an application whose original copy lies in the datacenter of the vendor and this vendor can:
Have his datacenter
Be a third party
Be a hosting vendor
Now why it is so important for organizations to switch to cloud based services and what makes Cloud such a wonderful offering to an organization. The beauty of Cloud lies in the fact that it is a much superior delivery model than any other model so far due to:
Cost as it is a “multi-tenant ”model
Technology like virtualization makes it much more cost effective for the customer
Scalability which sets no limits to the utilization of resources.
For a client, it is more of “Pay as you go ”model. Unlike in-premise based resources, a client does not have to keep paying extra dollars for unutilized and underutilized resources and as per the organizational requirements, a company can opt between a Public Cloud and a Private Cloud. On one hand public cloud makes it much more cost effective for an organization to utilize the resources but on the other hand, in order to maintain the privacy and security of data clients can opt for a private cloud also. And since a cloud application is specifically designed to run in the cloud environment, it already addresses the Storage need of information and data backup by replicating data repositories into the underlying cloud storage structure. And since client controls the very fabric of their cloud storage, so the additional copies of the data can be created offline if the need be.