Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Five myths about SaaS debunked

Is SaaS (software as a service) a trend that is gaining more and more of a foothold in IT departments, or is it doomed to be the bastard stepchild of traditional software?
Jeffrey Kaplan from Computerworld recently set out to debunk five common myths about the SaaS model. He had some interesting points to make which we have summarized in the bullets here below.

  • Myth 1: SaaS is a peripheral trend. Kaplan referred to a survey showing that SaaS usage had jumped from 32% in 2007 to 64% in 2008, and that 90% of the survey respondents were satisfied with the SaaS model and planned not only to renew their subscriptions but also planned to expand their usage of SaaS.
  • Myth 2: The SaaS model offers just one type of application. Aside from being offered on a subscription basis and using a single code base for all users, there is already a diverse range of SaaS applications available, and they are becoming increasingly customizable. There are more than 950 companies offering SaaS in over 80 industry and technology areas.
  • Myth 3: SaaS just provides simpler versions of more sophisticated applications. Kaplan argues that although SaaS applications are easier to deploy, users aren’t necessarily sacrificing functionality. He mentioned increased enterprise adoption as a sign of this and pointed out that large organizations constitute the fastest-growing customer category for Salesforce.com (which is the popular poster boy for the SaaS model).
  • Myth 4: SaaS is less reliable and secure than on-premise applications. Although service interruptions for Google Apps and Salesforce.com have put the SaaS model into question, Kaplan pointed out that these problems are not all that common, and that many enterprise outages last longer. As for the security aspect, no major compromise of a SaaS application has happened yet, opposed to numerous accounts of security breaches in traditional IT environments.
  • Myth 5: IT professionals are uniformly opposed to SaaS. While some worry about the implications of SaaS when it comes to both risks and their own livelihood, SaaS is according to Kaplan gaining acceptance among IT professionals. One of the reasons for this change is the perception that SaaS will rid them of much of the hassles of traditional software.

What we think

We’re essentially offering software as a service ourselves here at Pingdom, and for an application such as ours (a site monitoring service) the SaaS model is ideal.
That said, we still think that SaaS still isn’t suitable for everything. Anything that requires a significant amount of CPU horsepower per user (heavy graphics operations, for example) will for the foreseeable future be much more efficient as a local instead of a hosted application. But we’d love to be proven wrong, because SaaS is a very appealing model with a lot of upsides both for providers and end users.
A while back we wrote a detailed analysis about the pros and cons of SaaS that you may want to have a look at (it’s from all the way back in 2007, but as relevant now as it was then): Are hosted applications the future?

What do you think?

Do you agree or disagree? What are your opinions about SaaS?

SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

Powerful transaction monitoring now complements the availability and real user [...]

Exit Rate vs Bounce Rate – Which One You Should Improve and Why

Tracking your website’s exit and bounce rates will give you insight into how [...]

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free