Virtualization remains, in my eyes, the poster child of sustainable technology for business. After all, it gives companies a way to do more work with fewer servers, which in turn frees up datacenter space and lowers energy bills. That's lean and green, a sentiment expressed in the Gartner report I discussed last week. But alongside virtualization, Gartner alluded to SaaS (software as a service), an interesting p But alongside virtualization, Gartner alluded to SaaS (software as a service), an interesting proposition indeed as the model becomes increasingly popular and viable. According to Gartner, the market “is projected to surpass $5.1 billion in 2007, a 21 percent increase from 2006 revenue…. The market is poised for strong growth through 2011, when worldwide revenue will reach $11.5 billion.” Just this week, in fact, HP unveiled a SaaS version of its Business Technology Optimization (BTO) suite, aimed at helping companies manage IT projects and services, ensure quality and performance of applications, and monitor online businesses. The whole concept behind SaaS, of course, is to pay another company to host applications for your organization. Thus, rather than dedicating server, datacenter space, and IT resources to, say, a CRM, ERP, or even security, you have Salesforce.com or NetSuite handle all that back-end stuff. Thus, you have potentially fewer servers, which means less heating and cooling and more datacenter space. Of course, it’s entirely possible that you’re going to quickly fill that freed-up datacenter with a new crop of machines dedicated to some other in-house application. Thus, you’re actually not reaping any of the more obvious green benefits. But consider this point, well expressed by Chuck Schaeffer, CEO of Aplicor: “Instead of thousands of customers individually operating thousands of servers and the power-hungry facilities to support those servers, the SaaS multitenant model centralizes datacenter operations to use less equipment and a small fraction of the supporting facility costs.” In other words, the service provided is going to use fewer machines to deliver apps than it would take if customers opted to run apps themselves in-house. That means less energy consumed and fewer carbon emissions produced on a global scale. The potential efficiency of an outsourced application doesn’t end there; the SaaS model, along with technologies such as virtualization, screams for more efficient coding, an intriguing point raised by Alistair Croll, vice president of product management and co-founder of Coradiant. There’s “a lot of distance — and computing overhead — between my code and the electricity of each processor cycle. Architecture choices, and even programming language, matter,” he writes. Indeed, heavy, fat, complex code results in more energy-wasting processor calls. While that may be more tolerable if the app is loaded on your desktop system, or even on an in-house server, it becomes less so as the distance between application and client grows. SaaS providers need to deliver applications speedily, both for the sake of reputation and to meet the requirements of SLAs. On a related note, the SaaS model is logical evolution of the thin-client model, which also warrants consideration as a lean, green technology. Rather than loading applications on individual desktop PCs throughout the organization, IT admins can give users lightweight systems and load the apps on back-end servers. That not only nets you energy savings, but it means fewer “house calls” to the help desk, which means admins can devote their time to more important tasks. SaaS is, of course, not for everyone, but as the model continues to prove itself viable, adoption will increase. If your company is among those weighing it as an option, be sure to factor in lean, green benefits. In this day and age, they’re quite valuable. Technology Industry