Posted on 17 June 2008 by James Blake

I read with interest a comment on one of the posts from the Product Beautiful blog.  The topic of the post was about the 5 types of beta programs that organisations commonly end up with.

The comment by Michael Ray Hopkin suggested a sixth type of beta - the SaaS beta.

"Develop or convert your products to a hosted/SaaS model, ratchet up your release cycles to monthly, then you can call it a ‘release’ or a ‘beta.’  Either way customers get their hands on the new functionality.  The SaaS model is great in many ways, but the traditional concept of beta changes dramatically."

While I agree that SaaS totally changes what a beta means, you still need to manage and test new features.  This is especially important for mission critical applications such as email. 

Managing the testing of new code in a truly multi-tenanted environment can be very complex - but then again so is building and maintaining a parallel grid architecture to process, store and retrieve decades worth of emails for tens-of-thousands of customers.  It is just something we needed to develop effective strategies for.

The thought of engineers throwing code up to SaaS platforms in the hope it works will make alarm bells ring in IT Manager's heads and does SaaS a great deal of injustice.

Category: Software-as-a-Service