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Road to the clouds: SaaS vs desktop

At the end of 2012, a small survey flashed on Habré “Why do you not use cloud infrastructure / services in your company?” His results are very indicative of the Russian SaaS market as a whole: most respondents consider cloud services to be either expensive or not safe for storing commercial information. Nevertheless, the number of players in the cloud services market is growing, and even now such “conservative” and, at first glance, desktop services like 1C are being offered as a service.

Terminology difficulties

Despite the existing prejudices and fear of users, cloud services are increasing their market share, are actively developing, and day after day they offer private clients and businesses new solutions and services: creating and storing notes, full-fledged documents, storing links, organizing corporate portals, real CRM in cloud, etc ...
Before trying to answer the question, what is the reason for the growing success, let's look at the concepts of "cloud" and "SaaS". Today in Russia, cloud services are subject to two main trends:
  1. incomplete understanding of the very essence of cloud services
  2. numerous myths about cost, danger, instability of services.

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Image source: www.computerra.ru

Let's start with the first item. Often, users by the term SaaS and the "cloud" understand the cloud virtual PBX, implemented through IP-telephony. However, this understanding significantly limits the functionality and cuts the essence of the concept itself. In fact, cloud technology is both Yandex or Google e-mail, and popular file storages, and Google Docs.

Wikipedia gives a rather convoluted explanation that there is SaaS, which is understandable mainly to technical specialists. Meanwhile, the decision to implement cloud infrastructure is often made by commercial experts. It is for them that I want to explain from the point of view of the manager’s conceptual apparatus. In principle, the entire essence of the cloud (SaaS) lies in the name itself - software as a service - software as a service. That is, a person does not receive a program installed on his computer, but some service, which for him is a utility for work / study / other purposes and at the same time “lives” in the browser, that is, is virtual. Such software does not need its own server, it does not require any special configurations of hardware and the operating system. The user opens the browser, enters the application, logs in and works.
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The choice of solutions for working in the clouds, indeed, is worthy and presented by a number of eminent companies. By the spring of 2013, there were several major players on the market offering corporate cloud solutions. Let's try to figure out who is who and what developers are ready to offer to business.


Clouds in faces: comfortable and simple.

First of all, as a whole class of tools working in the cloud, you can select small online applications that allow you to save user data on an external server (for a user, on a virtual disk). Of the most interesting, for example:
Most of the above applications are implemented in foreign languages ​​and are not widely used in Russia. However, the situation changes completely when it comes to larger players supplying the market with full-featured and often expensive solutions. Such offers are good for any business - from a few people to a large company, when you have to work with clients and you need to implement intra-company communication.

Clouds in faces: strong and functional, but alien

Today in Russia there are several powerful applications in the cloud solutions market for managing projects and documents that allow you to manage processes and even document flow. Conventionally, they can be divided into two large groups. The first is the well-known western services, some of which do not even have full Russian localization:

Clouds in faces: strong, functional and their

However, not only foreign developers are ready to offer SaaS solutions. In Russia, there has recently been an active growth of cloud services, and this has made it possible for obvious leaders to stand out in the market, some of whom have successfully begun expansion into Western Europe and the USA, creating a viable and relevant product for any market:
It is worthwhile to stop here and say that “Megaplan” and “Bitrix” belong to 1C, hence there are several features that can lead to diametrically opposite results:
1. 1C will not go to the development of "alien" CRM despite its already developed, so, most likely, a good cloud-based CRM can not be expected;
2. if there are two task managers, it is obvious that they will soon be merged into one, convenient, functional and strong. So, perhaps, another interesting cloud solution will soon appear on the market, combining a corporate portal and a project management system.

In principle, we can distinguish another group of cloud solutions - these are IP-telephony operators, who have already announced the creation of full-fledged virtual offices. From the Russian, you can highlight Mango Office , offering along with the cloud PBX and call center, integrated with CRM Mango Office. CRM has the usual functionality: a tool for managing customers and sales, setting goals for managers, managing transactions.

Clouds are a plus for developer and client

Customer benefits:

Pros for the developer:

Cloud economy

We have to admit that any modern company cannot exist without a specific set of general-purpose software and specific to the type of activity. Licensed software is quite expensive, requires a certain level of hardware, employee (s), serving a fleet of users' computers and software installed on them, paid implementation, training, and often paid support. Thus, the construction of an optimal software infrastructure of a company requires significant both one-time and fixed costs.

Turning to the "cloud", the company gets obvious financial advantages:

However, it should be borne in mind that often when introducing cloud technologies, the client faces high price tags for customization for his business or simply the impossibility of customization. At the same time, this problem is easily solved - the market is not monopolistic and you can always find decent alternative solutions.
Each company, making a decision on the introduction of cloud software, finds its additional benefits. But one thing remains unambiguous: when using this type of software, the ROI significantly increases - an indicator of return on business investment, which, of course, includes IT infrastructure.

Cloud critique

Any medal has two sides. When it comes to news in the IT-sphere, both sides of the medal are very pronounced: the front glitters and attracts, the opposite - frightens with uncertainty and leaves many questions open. So with SaaS - at the end of the article is to talk about the criticism of such decisions.

Probably the most ardent critic of cloud technologies is Richard Stallman. He talks amusingly about espionage, data insecurity, the inability to monitor all the operations of the program. If in the case of corporate software there is a copy of a program that is difficult and illegal to change, then “in the case of service programs ... you use a copy that you don’t have” . Stallman argues that clouds are a “devil-may-care” approach to client computing and traditionally in conclusion offers to use free software, create an alternative to servers, etc. ... In principle, he criticizes from the point of view of his philosophy and his arguments are of little weight to the Russian small and medium-sized business, however, it will be interesting and useful for professionals to read his articles.

So, despite the obvious advantages, cloud technologies have a number of aspects, if not negative, then significantly hindering the growth trend in popularity. They are not as global as Stallman’s criticism, but more practically directed.

The following two negative points are more relevant for Russia, Belarus and Ukraine:

Cloud perspectives in Russia

According to a Gartner campaign study , global expansion of cloud technologies in the corporate software sector will continue and grow in gross volumes from $ 12 million in 2011 to $ 21 million in 2015, reaching 16.3% of CARG (average annual growth rate) annually.

It is difficult to say that cloud technologies in Russia will blow up the market and completely replace desktop solutions. However, they are already influencing and will have an even greater impact on the development of user applications. This is due to the fact that a private user feels in the cloud as a host, a corporate user seeks to save; and it’s easy for both of them to work in cloud applications. That is why such technologies will definitely not be ignored and will develop further in the following possible directions:

Clouds will choose small and medium businesses, small groups of freelancers and serious advertising agencies. Clouds will work, grow, generate new forms of existence of the IT infrastructure of the campaigns. They will be competitors for the desktop, but in the near future will not take his place. It is impossible to say that the future is beyond the clouds, but it is also difficult to imagine the future without them too.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/176079/

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