5 Reasons Why SaaS Companies Can’t Use Third Party Software Out of the Box

In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, companies like Yahoo and other consumer web companies were experiencing an unprecedented scale challenge –more than a hundred million users were using their web application. This was a scale that had never been seen before by makers of traditional software components and products. Shrink-wrapped products and platform components were written for large organizations and offline bulk processing and thus could not scale.  From outside, I used to hear that Yahoo had to develop everything on their own since no third party software could meet their scale needs. Later on, I worked at Yahoo and saw first hand the scale challenges and built technology platforms to address them.

When I started at Jobvite in 2008, we started to bring in open source technologies and gradually phased out proprietary technologies because we wanted to build a platform that would scale for millions of users without breaking the bank. Back then, Jobvite’s application served 40,000 users. Today, Jobvite’s recruiting platform serves nearly 50 million users.

Although the majority of our platform stack is based on open source technologies, we have come across situations where we’ve had to look for a third party paid software component because either there is no open source alternative and/or we do not want to get distracted from our core. When we start to look at third party technologies, we hardly find anything that supports the fundamental building blocks of SaaS. Hence we are forced to build from scratch on our own or do major re-architecture of a third party component.  Here are the five reasons why Jobvite and many SaaS companies can’t use third party software out of the box:

1. Multi-Tenancy
2. Security Model
3. Scale
4. Scope
5. Customizations and personalization

- See more at: http://blog.jobvite.com/2014/05/5-reasons-why-saas-companies-cant-use-third-party-software-out-of-the-box/#sthash.zCyL91tq.dpufSee more at: http://blog.jobvite.com/2014/05/5-reasons-why-saas-companies-cant-use-third-party-software-out-of-the-box/#sthash.2slydneS.dpuf