Intelligent Data Centres Issue 28 | Page 63

UNCOVERING THE LAYERS
Ed Ansett , Co-founder and Chairman of i3 Solutions Group
According to a report by FinancesOnline , much of the enterprise applications world is already SaaS-based .
“ As a key component of the cloud computing market , the global SaaS market size is estimated at around US $ 158.2 billion in 2020 . With a CAGR of 11.7 % in the next four-year period , the projected SaaS market size will be about US $ 307.3 billion by the end of 2026 .” In the collaboration application segment ,
SaaS penetration is getting the lion ’ s share at 81 % of the market , it says .
The biggest SaaS applications are collaboration , human capital management , CRM , ERP , BI , SCM and Content .
Any list of the world ’ s top SaaS companies usually places Salesforce at the top , even before it announced its intention to buy Slack for US $ 28 billion . Microsoft is usually number two followed by firms such as Adobe , Box and Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) SaaS . From the traditional enterprise software world , firms such as Oracle , Docusign and IBM Software are not far behind along with firms like ServiceNow and Workday .
What every SaaS provider has in common is knowing how to sweat their assets .
Where SaaS resides
The big SaaS companies can be split between those that own and operate data centres , Microsoft , AWS and others that buy data centre services . SaaS companies generally run a hybrid mix of data centres from the commercial colo space and cloud providers .
The delivery model is based on redundancy . Salesforce said : “ Customer success drives our data centre strategy and delivering the highest standard in availability , performance and security is our top priority . To that end , we build and serve each Salesforce instance from two geographically diverse data centres to have availability our customers have come to expect from us . At any given time , your Salesforce instance is actively served from one location with transactions replicated in near real-time , to a completely redundant , secondary location . We regularly site switch between the locations for maintenance , compliance and Disaster Recovery purposes . As we continue to expand and improve our global infrastructure presence , we recommend customers build their applications free of specific data centre requirements to support a seamless Salesforce experience .”
Salesforce added : “ In addition , we have instances served from AWS Cloud www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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