Robert Desisto recently posted Gartner’s 2013 Software as a Service predictions, and an IT professional asked me for my opinion.  Here are my thoughts on how the SaaS predictions impact enterprise IT strategies and tactics:

Key findings from the Gartner predictions include:

• [SaaS] Service-level agreements (SLAs) will continue to lag behind customer needs.

My Take:  Most likely true for enterprise organizations that require significant availability, reliability, and performance.  Inserting a gateway/proxy in between the enterprise users and the SaaS application can help organizations monitor SaaS compliance with SLAs.

• Platform as a service (PaaS) will become a must-have for enterprise-class software as a service (SaaS) applications.

My Take: I would moderate this statement and propose “Teams developing SaaS applications will gain greater productivity by building on top of PaaS platforms that internally manage multi-tenancy, tenant-aware and service-aware load balancing, resource pooling, and elastic scalability.  SaaS applications built as cloud-aware applications on multi-tenant, shared container PaaS will maximize scalability while reducing cost per tenant.  what is your evaluation criteria for selecting an appropriate PaaS platform?

• The role of  Internal Cloud Service Brokers will become more important for Enterprise SaaS intiatives.

My Take:  Internal Cloud Service brokers can overlay identity provisioning, security and service level management on external Enterprise SaaS offerings.  An internal cloud service broker can be implemented in-house by deploying an API manager product  that will monitor usage, enforce access policies, enforce subscription policies, and provide a single user provisioning console.

What are your SaaS predictions that impact application service adoption?