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SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE IS LOOKING GOOD INBROADCAST APPLICATIONS
Jim Martinolich
Chyron CorporationMelville, New York
 
INTRODUCTION
The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) concept isspreading throughout the IT and professional servicesindustry. But does it have a place in the hardware-intensive world of broadcast television production?This paper will describe how SaaS is being used tosuccessfully create broadcast graphics at manyfacilities today and how it may herald the future of many broadcast applications. This paper will describefirst hand the experiences of one station that hassuccessfully adopted SaaS into their news productionworkflow.
WHAT IS SAAS?
Like in any industry these days, software plays acrucial role in broadcasting. In a traditionalcommercial software model, a customer purchasesthe software from a vendor, incurring a capitalexpense that they expect to amortize over a period of time, and install it on their own IT infrastructure.The customer is now responsible for maintaining thehardware, ensuring the security of the application anddata, making and archiving backups, installingupgrades from the vendor as they become available.When problems arise, the customer needs to contactthe vendor and try to debug the problem remotely or wait for service representative to visit. As thecustomer’s requirements grow, new hardware and/or software upgrades are required.Before SaaS, all these issues were assumed to be thenatural cost of ownership and a necessary trade off for the benefits provided by the software. Softwareas a Service (SaaS) refers to a revolutionary new business model where the software application ishosted by the vendor and provided as a service to thecustomer via the Internet. In most SaaS applications aweb browser is used as a client so little or no setup or installation is required.SaaS applications are becoming more and morecommon in every industry and in consumer applications. The saas-showplace.com website, anindustry guide, lists 950 vendors of SaaS applicationsin 25 industries and that list is growing. Industry polls show a high degree of satisfaction with SaaS products.Common examples of web provided services would be Internet search tools such as Google, socialnetworking sites such as Facebook, or consumer media sites such as iTunes and YouTube. All of these would be impractical if not impossible to be provided as desktop applications. A better exampleof SaaS as the “disruptive technology” changing theway we do things, is Google Docs which offers itself as an alternative to traditional office suiteapplications at no cost. Google Docs offers lessfeatures than traditional office products, but offers benefits such as online access to your documents andeasy workgroup collaboration.
Fig 1 – Traditional vs. SaaS Software
 
The most common example of a successful professional SaaS application is the SalesForceCustomer Relationship Manager (CRM). SalesForcehas won numerous awards and their user base hasgrown from 5,000 to 50,000 clients (includingChyron) since 2001 and is on an exponential growth path. First of all, Salesforce is a well designedapplication that provides real benefits to their customers. SaaS will not make a bad application better. But the SaaS model proved to be a compellingadvantage for SalesForce in the CRM market, for many of the reasons I will now describe.
WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF SAAS?
SaaS has many benefits for both the vendor and theclient over traditional software models. SaaS savesthe client money because rather than having a largeupfront fee like traditional purchased software, SaaSis usually sold on a subscription model. You “pay asyou go” with a monthly or yearly fee per seat or per service. That means better return on investment sincethe investment is small. SaaS applications are usuallyvery scalable and you pay for services as you needthem. It is easy to add or remove users as your needschange so you don’t need to pay up front for your eventual long term needs.The client also benefits from not needing to purchaseand maintain the IT hardware to run the application.You do not need to tie up engineering and ITresources maintaining the software, backing up data,installing updates, or debugging problems when theyarise. Your staff can focus on producing goodcontent and not maintaining their software tools.SaaS saves you time, because in many cases a SaaSapplication can be up and running almostimmediately. You just log on. You do not need to plan ahead to purchase and install hardware. You donot need to wait for the vendor to come on-site tocommission the system. Software updates and bugresolutions can happen immediately andtransparently, you don’t need to schedule times for the vendor to come and install updates.With SaaS, the vendor is providing more than just thesoftware application and a hardware platform, theyare providing a 24 by 7 service and are responsiblefor ensuring that it works smoothly. This eliminatesfinger pointing, misunderstanding and delays. Thevendor is constantly on-site and monitoring usage for  problems. They likely have numerous clients and arelearning how to improve the product through avariety of user experiences.SaaS simplifies the vendor’s job by eliminating theneed to distribute software and ensuring it is properlyinstalled on the client’s hardware. Updates areinstalled immediately and there are never any“versioning” problems. Customer service costs arekept to a minimum because service calls are notneeded. The vendor maintains physical control of thesoftware at all times.The SaaS ‘community’ benefits from economies of scale and can afford to provide a much higher levelof redundancy and security in their infrastructure thancould the individual client at a given cost.In today’s mobile environment, there arecollaboration benefits to a hosted SaaS applicationoffering centralized data storage with ubiquitous webaccess. Before Chyron adopted the SalesForce CRM,each salesperson had their own contact databasewhich they would occasionally update. They didn’talways have access to their own database when theywere on the road. Customer Service and Sales haddifferent contact info and there was little sharing of information between them. SalesForce unified all thecontact and customer information into a singledatabase that is remotely available to everyone,whether they are in their office, at home or on theroad. It is instantly updated across the board. Newcontact information can be entered once andeveryone has it. For instance, a record of a serviceissue is immediately available to the salesperson sothat they can follow up.
WHAT ARE THE CONCERNS ABOUT SAAS?
Broadcasters are constantly adopting newtechnologies, and with every change the benefitshave to be weighed against the risks. What are therisks associated with the SaaS solution? And, moreimportantly, how do they compare to the risks of hosting the application yourself?The most common concerns about SaaS solutions areavailability and security. How do I know if theapplication will be available when I need it? Will it be more or less available than if I host it myself andat what cost? As was described in the previoussection, it is usually the case that the SaaS vendor’sinfrastructure can take advantage of economies of scale to build a more reliable and fault tolerantsystem then you could afford to have in-house. Andif there are problems in the application, the vendor’sstaff is available to diagnose and fix the problemimmediately, in many cases even before you knowyou had a problem.
 
Many prospective SaaS users may think, “What if myInternet connection goes down?” While that is avalid point, modern IT practices provide extremelyhigh levels of availability, redundancy and security.The Internet has become a “mission critical”component of almost every industry, and tremendousresources are committed to keeping it workingsmoothly. Large scale Internet outages are so rarethat they are international news when they occur.Localized outages can be managed by your service provider. No doubt you have been using the Internetin production for many years and have a proven track record with your local provider. Backup plans canand should be in place. A downed Internetconnection would affect much more than the oneSaaS application. Especially in news production, the broadcaster is fully dependent on their Internetconnection to get the information they need.How safe and secure is my data? Once again this is avalid concern, and a prospective SaaS customer should ask the right questions and ensure that thevendor provides the necessary levels of safety andsecurity; data backup procedures, redundancy inhardware and power systems and geographicredundancy. Is the application scalable in case thereis a sudden peak in usage? Will the data be availableto me in a form that I can use outside of the hostedsystem? Compare all this to the level of safety andsecurity you can provide if you bring the applicationin house. Managed and backed up data storage has areal cost, just ask your IT manager. The SaaS vendor has the advantage of economy of scale lowering therelative costs of this storage. The bottom line is thatthe SaaS vendor’s job to provide availability andsecurity along with the application.
THE SAAS INFRASTRUCTURE
A SaaS application must be hosted on robustinfrastructure in order to provide the necessaryavailability, security and speed. A Data Center isrequired that provides high availability of services;reliable redundant equipment, power, cooling, fire protection, physical security, managed storage andhigh Internet bandwidth. It also must provide aroundthe clock maintenance and support staff in case of  problems.Maintaining a private data center is not cost effectivefor the typical SaaS application, instead they arehosted on a shared data center called a “collocationcenter” (or ‘colo’). The colo is operated by a third party and provides the basic physical infrastructureincluding extremely high speed links into Internet peering points to guarantee a high speed connectionsto anywhere on the Internet.The SaaS vendor leases space and bandwidth at thecolo facility and is responsible for providing thenecessary computer hardware. It can range from asingle server to one or more 19” racks. A typicalSaaS application requires at a minimum a web server and a database server. Since there should be no“single point of failure” both the web server and thedatabase should have redundancy built in. A simpleclustered server has an active online server and a hot backup. If the online server fails the cluster management application switches the applicationover to the hot backup.A SaaS application that wants to increase throughputwill use a “load balancing” system to share theworkload among multiple redundant online servers.Each web access is routed by the load balancer to thenext available server. Load balancing requires somemethod of persisting a user’s session informationfrom one request to the next.A SaaS vendor may also want to plan for geographicredundancy, a second hosting facility located far away from the first with a means to fail over or load balance between the two. That ensures availability of the application in case there is a catastrophic failureof the primary colo facility.Cloud computing refers to another new hostingtechnology that different than collocation centers. Incloud computing, IT resources, computing hardwareand storage, are a commodity similar to gas or electricity provided by a service provider. Amazonstarted offering spare resources from their vaststockpile of computers and today their ElasticCompute Cloud (EC2) charges per hour for CPUresources and per gigabyte to move data in and out of the ‘cloud’. Google, Microsoft and less well knowncompanies provide cloud computing resources.The pros and cons of cloud computing are similar tothose of SaaS, but in cloud computing the ITresources themselves are the product not theapplication. And you can easily see that theavailability of almost limitless cloud of on-demandcomputing resources provided by some of the biggestnames in the industry will encourage the growth of SaaS applications of many kinds.
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