This goes to Salesforce, Google Apps and every other vendor on the cloud computing market who is offering a Software-as-a-Service solution. When do you try to provide a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that is based on a REAL pay per use base?

We all here a lot about the benefits of cloud computing like flexibility, scalibility and pay per use. That means you only pay for the resources or the service you actually use. Using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions you really pay for what you use. For example per hour or per gigabytes. Well, using common SaaS solutions you do not pay for what you use. You pay per user and this per month or per year! Ist this pay per use when you pay per user even when the user do not use the service 3 days a week? NO, this is not pay per use.

Good examples for the big players on the cloud computing market are Salesforce or Google (Apps). Google offers two plans for using „Google Apps for Business“. An annual plan and a flexible plan. The annual plan means you pay $50 per user account per year AND you have an annual contract – duration 1 year! The flexible plan is – like the name – more flexible. You pay $5 per user account per month and you do not have an annual plan. But you have to pay even when your employees are, for example, on vacation!

Salesforce is just as bad! Looking on their Sales Cloud – Group offering you have to pay $15 per user per month and „All per user products require an annual contract.“ So again, you have to pay for a service even when your employees do not use it!

But not only Salesforce or Google Apps go this NOT pay per use way! If you take a look on the whole SaaS market each vendor is offering this model! So, please tell me, where is the real SaaS pay per use model? Where is the real flexibility? Cloud Computing means that I just pay for the service when I am using it! Does that mean that Salesforce, Google Apps and any other SaaS vendor do not offering cloud computing services?

Offering a service over the internet using a webbrowser is not cloud computing per se!

During my research for an article I found an idea every SaaS vendor can use to offer a real pay per use solution. The idea comes from HP and is called SAPS (Application Performance Standard Meter). HP uses it to make a precise daily billing for the SAP systems they are hosting for their customers. On the base of SAPS the resource consumption of every SAP system is measured every five minutes. It’s comparable with a power meter. This requires two measured values: the required processing power and the input / output throughput. With a built-in matrix, the collected data is converted in kiloSAPS-hours and kiloIOPS-hours (IOPS = Input / Output Performance Standard). The customer receives an accurate breakdown of the resources he uses, and an exact assignment to the respective SAP system.

Right this is for SAP systems, but it shows that it is possible to make a precise daily billing for each resource a customer is using. The SaaS vendors just need to do it!

On the 14th of September ’11 eyeOS announced its first cloud desktop Professional Edition. In times of cloud computing you actually need to call it „DaaS“ Desktop-as-a-Service, right?

Well, the idea behind eyeOS is easy. You just need a webbrowser to have access to your working space like spreadsheets, word processors, e-mail etc. You connect to a website, log-in and start to work. And you can do that from wherever you are. In the office, your home office, at Starbucks. Everything you need is a stable internet connection.

Well, after a closer look at the new Professional Edition the internet connection is the biggest problem. Honestly I just have a 2 Mbits connection, but the response time after clicking on something is not as you can „feel“ on your local desktop. The look and feel is copied from the Linux world. This is not surprising, eyeOS started as an open source project and is still very active.

eyeOS is an own operating systems running in your webbrowser. For example it has a taskbar where you can switch between the open applications and an user management system. By default you’ll find applications like a calculator, calendar, chat tool, notepad, contacts manager, word processor, email client and a file explorer. That’s it. I know from previous versions that you can install other applications using the admin panel, but I couldn’t find anything in the test version.

The handling of the word processor (eyeDocs) reminds me on typical word processors of yesteryears. You do not have a lot of functions but actually they are enough for typical things like writing an article. You can compare the range of functions for example with Google Docs.

I would like to write something more about eyeOS. But there is nothing more to say. The range of functions is pretty low and you can do not really amazing things. It’s just an OS in your webbrowser.

Well, Desktop-as-a-Service like eyeOS is the future of desktop services, yes. But not eyeOS itself. Especially the Professional Edition is not business ready so far. It is to slow (ok, my internet connection) and the amount of functionality and applications are not acceptable for companies. Of course you can use eyeOS writing an article and normal things like managing your contacts and the calendar. But I couldn’t find any groundbreaking functionality why using eyeOS in my company. eyeOS is innovative because it runs in the webbrowser without installing everything locally but where is the added value?

Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of those kinds of DaaS, because you can work from everywhere and have all your data and applications on board. But eyeOS is not ready to replace common local desktop solutions.