Not long ago, when a company wanted to replace or enhance a process with computers and software they had to buy a computer and software. In many cases they would even have to hire consultants to implement it, as well as beef up their IT department to support it.In another example, a small company needs to automate and centralize its CRM. They find a website that offers a CRM solution as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). It costs as low as $10 a month, so the company purchases it, and starts entering in their customer base.
This is an extreme example of how software-as-a-service is emerging.
So what is SaaS? In simple terms, it is an on-demand software solution that is licensed to customers and deployed on the provider’s hardware. SaaS has been around for a long time and up until now been limited to web-hosting and email. Today, there are SaaS providers that offer everything from project management to word processing.
Some of the benefits of SaaS are as follows:
- It is less expensive and faster to start using with no hardware to buy and the implementation is usually on-demand.
- Scaling is easier and less expensive since you can add more users as needed without having to worry if your hardware and support team can handle it.
- Their is little to no maintenance with no patching or upgrading, and the maintenance that is necessary is handled by a provider for little or no cost.
- Centralized data and access is possible since it is usually hosted on the web where you can access it from work, home, or even the coffee shop.
SaaS does have its shortcomings, however, some of those are:
- You have no control over the maintenance or if the service has planned (or unplanned) maintenance since it occurs on the provider’s schedule, not yours.
- You have slimmer feature sets because, generally speaking, when a provider has to support a larger customer-base features are sometimes prioritized by the lowest common denominator.
- Integration and interoperability can occur since you don’t actually store the data of the service yourself and you are limited to the provider’s ability to share your information with other systems. (This is actually being improved by many SaaS provider’s such as Salesforce’s app exchange.)
These shortcomings are becoming less relevant today as SaaS providers are offering solutions that are not only more flexible and reliable than their “concrete” software counterparts, but they are also cheaper and easier to use. Today, it’s even possible to implement and bring up new hardware on-demand in the same fashion as SaaS, and all that happens on “The Cloud”. But hey, that’s another buzz word, for another post.
