Cisco Systems
Problem Definition:
Software as a Service (SaaS) is an emerging market. The challenges faced on delivering SaaS are very unique. SaaS competes with traditional Enterprise software. The key advantages driving adoption of SaaS have been the time to market, working across company boundaries, cost of ownership and last not the least availability. All the advantages for SaaS conflict with availability. Time to market - it is a challenge to get new releases out fast while maintaining high availability. Working across company boundaries - the requirement is to act as a cross-company IT department and make the service work across companies and at the same time maintain a very high availability. Cost of ownership – SaaS utilizes multi-tenancy to reduce the cost of ownership. Supporting multiple customers in a common infrastructure does increase the possibility of one customer affecting the other customer. This in turn could affect Availability.
Solution:
The solution tried at Cisco/WebEx has been multi-faceted. There has been a lot software, infrastructure and process engineering. The software has been architected to scale and with built-in hooks for monitoring. The infrastructure has been architected for redundancy and failover. Processes have been engineered to accommodate changes while maintaining the reliability and availability.
Analysis:
The availability of the Cisco/WebEx service has improved significantly with the implementation of the software, infrastructure and process engineering. Cisco/WebEx has become the SaaS leader in availability. The changes made and the corresponding results achieved will be discussed. Currently Cisco/WebEx is in the process of coming up with Industry Standard metrics for measuring Availability in SaaS.