Why SaaS ?

More than this, SaaS is a particularly efficient model for developing, rolling out tools and implementing modernization projects whose advantages are likely to deeply affect the modernization market.

1/ Instant roll-out

Modernization applications must be accessories to different user populations (IT Division, Developers, Tests, Methods and Quality, Operations) from various sites distributed over extended geographical areas (offshore). The SaaS model provides all these users with shared and immediate access to the knowledge base of their assets stored in Refine.

The roll-out of modernization solutions according to the traditional model is particularly laborious due to the technical complexity of solutions and to the high level of skills required to perform the installation, configuration and administration of these solutions.

2/ Priority to results, not to infrastructure

With no software or hardware to buy, install, manage or upgrade, the popularity of SaaS solutions is constantly increasing with IT companies that constantly need to do more with fewer resources. The sharing a pooling of infrastructures proposed by Refine SaaS model allows companies to familiarize themselves with, to validate the relevance and efficiency and to appropriate SaaS modernization solutions without the need to first invest in new infrastructures and skills (administration in particular). Why burden ourselves?

3/ Better productivity and risk management

SaaS model resource pooling and skill centralization provides not only high performance hardware and software infrastructure, but also offers productivity and quality gains acquired by experience and specialization in the form of industrialized processes.

Contrary to a traditional approach, the Refine SaaS is not limited to providing a series of tools, leaving users to manage with a catalogue of features to achieve their goal, i.e. to reduce the costs, risks or duration of their maintenance, governance or mass change processes.

The Refine SaaS is designed to develop, adapt and transmit all structured processes for achieving the above-mentioned goals, in the context of an industrialized approach (centralization, tailoring, standardization, capitalization). The modernization processes built into the Refine tools are the result of 12 years' experience and of the determination to make our know-how available to the market (customers and partners).

4/ On demand processing power

Modernization processes can mobilize significant computing power over limited time periods, in particular when importing new assets into the code base.
By pooling its users' resources, SaaS can offer very high computing power capable of performing all mass modernization processes in a very short time.

5/ Lower start-up and long-term costs

One can easily understand why a SaaS solution is significantly cheaper from the outset. No hardware to buy, adapt or maintain, no operating system, no database server nor applications to install, no consultant nor staff required to manage it all and no upgrades required.

Despite this, the long-term savings are even higher. Gartner estimates that two thirds of time and budgets spent on IT are dedicated to infrastructure management and updates. With the on-demand model, this is a thing of the past.

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for a conventional solution (purchase of software installed internally) is, according to analyses, at least 2.5 fold higher than that of a SaaS solution. Furthermore, the model offers costs proportional to user consumption, thus offering an incomparable model in the case of the progressive roll-out of modernization services within a company.

6/ An absolute requirement : upgradeability

The modernization activity requires a high degree of platform upgradeability that is a strong ability to develop new solutions or add-ons with competitive prices and deadlines.

This requirement for upgradeability is simply the result of 3 phenomena:

• the great variety of existing languages (400+) and systems, combined with
• the boundless imagination of the developers of legacy solutions to modernize, and
• the extreme diversity of project requirements: type of analysis (inspection rules) and change (target maintainability).

The traditional software model (bought and installed by the user) is incapable of meeting this fundamental business requirement.

Thanks to the model's inherent pooling and centralization, the Refine SaaS is extremely efficient for developing and rolling out this constant flow of changes, at unbeatable prices and in record time.

Finally, the Refine platform is an open platform as it possesses its own SDK allowing all market players (customers, partners and MetaWare) to develop the adaptations and new solutions that they require by building on all past development activities available in the form of reusable components.

The Refine SDK is a highly specialized tool, the result of research, whose relevance and productivity gains have been validated by the world's leading computer science research laboratories, that have themselves used this SDK for years to conduct their software reengineering research.