In a recent set of newsletters we wrote about the forthcoming perfect storm. As we stated in those newsletters, many IT organizations are making a series of reasonable steps that are likely to lead them to a place where they have lost the ability to manage application performance over the WAN. Based on feedback from a number or people, we are going to use this newsletter to expand on that discussion.

When we previously discussed the perfect storm, we referred to the impact on the IT organization of implementing virtualization, SOA/Web services and Web 2.0. Our position is that we are approaching a time when the IT organization can go to senior management and state that because of implementing virtualization they have been able to significantly reduce the cost of IT. They will also be able to say that because of adopting an SOA and a Web 2.0 approach to application development, the business is much more agile. Unfortunately, the IT organization will also have to report that as a result of adopting those technologies, it has lost all ability to monitor or manage application performance.

Since we wrote those newsletters a number of people have asked us about software-as-a-service (SaaS) and its impact. As background on this topic, many IT professionals were initially skeptical about SaaS when the term first appeared a few years ago. Part of that skepticism stemmed from the fact that it seemed like SaaS was a concept that failed before and was now suddenly reappearing under a different name. In particular, it was not that many years ago the industry press was agog with application service providers (ASP). As is widely known, ASPs did not live up to all of the hype.

However, the success of Salesforce.com has proven that the SaaS market is real. We see the impact of SaaS as being somewhat similar to the impact of a Web 2.0 inspired mashup. In both cases, the enterprise is accessing an application over a WAN and the enterprise had no control over how the application was developed or deployed. In addition, in most cases the enterprise has, at best, limited ability to monitor or manage the application provider. Because of these factors and because of the growing interest in SaaS, SaaS needs to be included as one of the key factors driving the perfect storm.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.