Specific Answers to Important Questions
Q: What's the easiest way to understand SaaSGrid?
Conceptually, SaaSGrid parallels the operating system or the modern day application server; it defines a concrete layer that "sits below" your application and acts as a host for your application. As a hosting layer, SaaSGrid manages network resources while providing an environment that allows your application to function as a SaaS offering even if it wasn't written as one. Furthermore, very much like your operating system might provide you a control panel, SaaSGrid provides a variety of tools via the web to interact with your deployed application.
Q: Is SaaSGrid Just a Technology Solution?
Absolutely not! Although SaaSGrid performs impressive technical magic to host relatively standard web applications as SaaS offerings, it has significant strengths in helping you manage your SaaS business. Ranging from the ability to link to merchant accounts, accept credit cards, and define complex pricing structures to providing tools that focus on customer management and business analytics, SaaSGrid helps ensure that you have what you need to understand and react to your market and service your customers.
Q: Is SaaSGrid a virtualization technology?
SaaSGrid is not a virtualization technology that uses machine images to perform its magic. Instead, SaaSGrid relies on a unique architecture to endow your application with SaaS specific functionality such as multi-tenancy. Virtualization normally helps solve certain types of scale and deployment issues, but is not a means for solving SaaS problems and does not provide any sort of SaaS delivery mechanics.
Q: Is SaaSGrid really a grid?
Yes. SaaSGrid uses a distributed grid architecture to host SaaS applications in a decentralized fashion, allowing for failure tolerance, easier scalability, and high availability.
Q: Does my application have to adhere to specific user interface guidelines, or is my user interface limited in any way?
Unlike some SaaS platforms out there today, SaaSGrid user interfaces are not part of a platform-wide dashboard or plugin architecture. Since developing for SaaSGrid adheres to the practice of separation of user interfaces from business logic, you are free to use your user interface framework of choice. Of course, you can build an application using traditional ASP.NET WebForms, or the new ASP.NET MVC Framework, but you are not limited to these. You can build your user interface using a client javascript framework such as ExtJS, YUI, or MooTools. You can even utilize rich content frameworks such as Flash or Silverlight.
Q: Does Apprenda host SaaSGrid applications?
No. Apprenda's core competency is in building powerful SaaS enablement technology. SaaSGrid is a new breed of cloud middleware that is licensed and installed on your own hardware, co-location space, cloud infrastructure, or any combination of infrastructure resources. SaaSGrid stitches your infrastructure resources together, creating a highly resilient peer to peer fabric that is fine tuned for SaaS delivery.
Q: Can I test drive SaaSGrid?
Yes! You can download SaaSGrid Express edition, which is a free and feature rich product based on the full production SaaSGrid edition.
Q: How is SaaSGrid Express different than the established SaaSGrid?
SaaSGrid Express edition is currently in beta, and many of features of the full SaaSGrid production edition have been ported to SaaSGrid Express. For, details on the differences between the two products, you can refer to the SaaSGrid licensing matrix.
Q: Is it appropriate to compare SaaSGrid to services like Amazon's EC2?
No. SaaSGrid is not virtualization technology so a comparison to Amazon's EC2 is not appropriate. Services like EC2 provide a Resource as a Service offering that is closer to "bare metal." SaaSGrid provides higher level functions that provide targeted SaaS value.
Q: Do I need to learn a new programming language to build SaaS applications for SaaSGrid?
No. SaaSGrid lets you utilize Microsoft .NET languages to write code and provides a slim, simple yet very powerful API layer that allows the application to interact with SaaSGrid in certain explicit ways.
Q: I want to port an application to the SaaS model via SaaSGrid, how long will it take me?
It depends. SaaSGrid provides value two ways: explicitly through the application interacting with the SaaSGrid API and implicitly as part of deployment. The implicit portion (things like multi-tenancy and provisioning) require no effort on your part and are available out of the box. Therefore, the amount of time it takes to port is highly dependent on the size of your application and the richness of the explicit interactions you plan on taking. Given that you would have to port your application to SaaS anyway, SaaSGrid provides the fastest path to SaaS since the port requirements are fairly minimal.
Q: Can I integrate external systems with my SaaSGrid application?
Yes. SaaSGrid applications are built using rich web services. These web services can be exposed by SaaSGrid as a web API, allowing for integrations with external systems.
