SaaS Performance Bar Rising

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Sevcik and Wetzel.

For mission-critical SaaS applications to displace their locally accessed cousins, SaaS end-user response times must rival those of the on-premises incumbents. Achieving this goal is challenging, and requires continuous end-user experience monitoring. SaaS vendors must use performance information to continuously improve response times to meet the same performance standards as on-premises software.

The performance of SaaS applications is subject to more variables than on-premises solutions. These variables include the performance of:

• the application itself,
• the data center infrastructure on which the application runs,
• all of the network segments along the path between application and user, and,
• the browser/client software on the user’s computer or mobile device.

Users are likely to access a SaaS app through a variety of means, such as from a smart phone on a cellular data network, from a desktop computer with a broadband connection, or from a tablet connected to a public Wi-Fi hotspot. Not only do these individual variables contribute to how a SaaS application performs, interactions among them also affect overall performance. For example, if an application has a high turn count and is located far from a user, lots of round trips over long distances will slow application response times…

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