Roles of Systems and Application

¶ … Roles of Systems and Application Software

Managing system-wide tasks, coordinating and synchronizing the many subsystems of an operating system, managing the processors', memory's and peripherals' many activities in addition to ensuring compatibility for applications, systems software performs the vital tasks of keeping all system software components synchronized with each other. The role of systems software is also to provide the necessary integration to both networks and other applications. While the approaches used in system software vary for accomplishing this integration, the most common communications standard used is the TCP/IP protocol. Today all Microsoft systems software (including all operating systems and development platforms including the.Net Architecture) support TCP/IP as the networking standard. In addition, many systems software components allow for development of new applications as well, as Microsoft does by including a low-end Visual Basic compiler in many of their operating systems.

Applications software relies on system software to create the foundation by which specific and often highly tailored processes are defined and used to accomplish a specific series of tasks and strategies. Enterprise application software is the class of software that spans across an entire company, as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) or any other of literally dozens of application categories.

There are also application software programs that are used on personal computers (PCs) and laptops. The most prevalent class of application software in the area of PCs and laptops are office automation applications, of which Microsoft Office is by far the most dominant in use today. Applications on PCs and laptops are even greater in number and variety than those found in enterprise software, as the ubiquity of PCs and the high mobility of laptops have made both of these hardware platforms attractive for software developers to write their applications for. The use of applications software on PCs and laptops is also being heavily influenced by the Internet, with many applications today relying on the Internet for communication with other users, and also to get updates to their source code. Internet-based applications are becoming increasingly popular both for personal and professional use due to the enhanced reliability of the Internet itself and the use of browsers like Microsoft's Internet Explorer for example. There is also the emerging application category of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which is discussed in the next section of this paper.

Defining Software-as-a-Service

The concept behind Software-as-a-Service is that of making applications available over the Internet, available on a 24/7 basis, accessible through a Web browser such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Netscape's Navigator, or any of the other literally hundreds of web browsers in use today. SaaS is by nature multi-tenant based, meaning that many application users can be using literally the same application at the same time, making each application session appear dedicated to the specific user. This differs from application hosting, where there is typically only single-tenant architecture, meaning that only one person can use the application being hosted at any point in time. SaaS is also unique in its business model, which alleviates the need for high fixed costs of deploying applications and instead invoices for use on either a per user or resource usage basis. In addition, there is no required upfront investment in either hardware or software as applications delivered over SaaS rely entirely on the existing Internet infrastructure in place. SaaS then drastically cuts the fixed costs of setting up new application software, and users get charged only for the users (seats) they need or the usage level. In addition, SaaS-based applications are unique in that upgrades and enhancements are delivered as they are available. This is significantly different than packaged software, where typically all the major updates are gathered and then released as part of an upgrade or service pack, much like what Microsoft does with both their operating systems and applications software.

The company I work for today uses SaaS-based applications for keeping track of customers through the use of Salesforce.com. AMR Research (2007) are predicting that Salesforce.com have over 800,000 installed seats today and will reach over 1 million paying subscribers by the end of the company's fiscal year. Like many companies, we're also customizing Salesforce.coms' applications to match exactly what we need in terms of being able to track specific customization orders from customers. We're also working with Salesforce.com to create more integration points to our hand-coded systems as well, using the Apex programming language. AMR Research (2007) has mentioned Apex in their cited research, specifically on the point of ensuring upgrade paths possible using Salesforce.com main components while customizing them with the Apex programming language as a key reason it departments are adopting Salesforce.com. This is in fact the reason our company chose salesforce.com and the SaaS platform as our CRM system, because we could quickly and easily customize it for our specific needs. Our it department spent the majority of the CRM budgets in the past trying to get our sales force and managers to use the systems in the first place. This is also a key finding from Dyche' (2002) and her finding that the majority if budgets for CRM implementations are spent on changing how people work and use the system, not necessarily on the software itself. This is certainly the case in our company as well. The decision to go with Salesforce.com within our company was also based on the fact that our senior financial managers looked at the cost of implementing the Oracle CRM system that is based on the Siebel software Oracle bought a few years ago. The decision to go with Salesforce.com was made because the pricing we received at $65 per user and the fact that Apex programming tools and support were free made the use of this SaaS-based application the most attractive. In addition, many members of our sales force don't have powerful laptops or home PCs, which would have been required to run the Oracle CRM client. Yet all of our sales force can reach the Internet, and many of them have previous experience using Salesforce.com software, which further added to the arguments for using the SaaS-based CRM application over the one that would need to be installed. All of these factors led to the development of a business case which showed that Salesforce.com was the best choice for our CRM system. According to industry experts, more and more companies are doing financial justification and ROI analysis of SaaS-based applications and choosing this class of application over the traditional licensed ones (Computer Business Review Online, 2006).