Moving to SaaS: Building a migration strategy from concept to deployment

The new market trends include globalization and service orientation as important drivers that are changing the way in which businesses operate. Companies are requesting flexible applications that can be acquired and executed seamlessly and independently of the location. This situation is progressively pushing businesses from a proprietary system orientation to a service one. Accordingly, more and more traditional software vendors are noticing the need to transform their current business and technology model in order to remain competitive in the market. Software as a Service (SaaS) has been set by these companies as a mandatory way to keep their existing customers while at the same time seizing the chance of acquiring new customers in unexplored markets. However, this transition from Software off-the-shelf to Software as a Service is not trivial as many issues (business, application, and technical) come into play. The real hands-on experience in implementing end-to-end SaaS migration strategies considering both business and technological dimensions of the problem are hardly covered. Hence, there exists a real demand for proven methods to perform the transition from traditional software products to the services concept. Based on this premise, this chapter presents a stepwise procedure and a method to migrate non-SaaS applications to SaaS taking into account not only technical and technological issues and constraints but also those issues related to business models and the monetization of the final solution. These methods are currently being supported by real-life experiments carried out in different companies based on successful SaaS implementation experiences, a deep understanding of the details, and a proven approach to making SaaS transformation happen in an accurate, secure, and sustainable way.