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.

