My name is Mukesh; I’m the Director of Architecture here at WebTrends. The web analytics industry is still abuzz with the recent news of outages at a prominent SaaS vendor.   Even prior to that, Salesforce.com suffered a major shutdown and a prominent industry blogger perceived a SaaS backlash.  At WebTrends we have gone to great lengths to build our solutions to be robust & scalable with the goal of assuring our current and future customers unhindered access to their data. I am excited to take this opportunity to provide some insights into the unparalleled flexibility of our WebTrends SaaS architecture.

First, in contrast to most web analytics vendors which provide only SaaS solutions, WebTrends provides pure SaaS, pure Software, and Software/SaaS hybrid solutions. This S+S capability allows each customer to choose none, some, or all components for deployment on its premise, while leaving the others to be hosted by WebTrends On Demand. Thus, each customer can make its own tradeoff between control and cost, depending on its own current and future needs, instead of being forced into a specific approach by the web analytics vendor.

Second, customers who partially or fully use our SaaS solutions get significant benefits from some important design choices we have made in building up our hosted infrastructure. I’ll discuss one such choice in this post, and leave the others for future.

There are two extreme architectures for hosting applications for multiple customers. In a purely tiered architecture, each tier of machines is assigned to a specific task (like data collection) across all customers. In contrast, a purely pod architecture assigns a pod of machines to a specific customer for all its tasks. There are clear advantages in either case:

•    Tiered architecture provides more robust and responsive service in presence of traffic variability and machine failures. In particular, while a single machine failure in the pod architecture could completely bring down service to  a customer, such a failure  in the tiered architecture will typically have no impact on the service to any customer.
•    Tiered architecture may require more movement of data as processing moves from one tier to another.
•    Tiered architecture improves efficiency by allowing a different hardware configuration in each tier, which is customized to its specific task.

These two pure architectures can be mixed to create hybrids – a pod may be made larger (and even tiered) to serve multiple customers, and a data center may be split into a few mega pods, each tiered and serving a group of customers with a common SLA.

WebTrends has created a hybrid architecture for hosting SaaS applications: while Analytics On Demand is primarily tiered and Marketing Warehouse & Visitor Intelligence On Demand is primarily based on pods, each of them is itself a hybrid. The tremendous flexibility of this poly-hybrid architecture allows WebTrends to provide an optimal combination of service availability, performance, and value to each customer.

Stay tuned for more and  thank you for reading – please reply below with any questions or comments.

Tags: analytics, architecture, hosted software, pod architecture, s+s, SaaS, Software, software as a service, tiered architecture

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Industry Perspectives, Inside Webtrends, Webtrends Innovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.