What Major Benefits Will You Derive from an SaaS Provider?
Posted by:
Walter Roark on
February 7, 2009 at
2:21AM AFT
If hosting your own community has strong appeal
to decision-makers in your organization, take time to consider the benefits of
partnering with an experienced SaaS provider. “Software as a Service” means
your community and all of the applications within it are hosted on your
provider’s servers. All of the content is simply accessed via a web browser.
Because SaaS is subscription-based, your vendor performs daily technical
operation, maintenance and support for your community for the term of the
subscription.
The Logic
of SaaS Benefits:
Reduce Costs
By
subscribing to a proven SaaS platform, you bypass a myriad of costs and
everyday worries. First, you don’t have to purchase licensed software for
deployment. Second, you’ll skip the purchase of servers and the continuous
maintenance of hardware and software. Third, you won’t need to search for and
hire additional IT personnel.
Leverage Economies of Scale
On
average, your application costs will be reduced because your provider has
multiple subscribers and all are linked to the same platform (or a slightly
customized one). Your provider will have made the overall system highly
scalable to service additional subscribers as they come on board. All the data
is securely stored and maintained to serve your needs. You pay a single regular
fee and your provider assumes all security and infrastructure costs. You can
concentrate on growing your business. Over time, growth and innovation will go hand-in-hand with your ROI.
Subscribe and Save Cash
Launching a
dynamic social media community can be expensive if you do it all yourself. The
initial outlay is significant and upkeep costs never go away. You save capital
when you utilize a software-as-a-service model. Whether you are building your
own platform or customizing an open-source version, buying servers, configuring
them, launching them and maintaining a data center demands a continuous
infusion of capital. In addition, if your SaaS subscription is based on metered
usage, you only pay for what you use.
Lock in a Quicker Deployment
The
demands of developing code and the details of implementing a community are
daunting. Not to mention time-consuming. On the other hand, an SaaS provider
has software up and running in a secure data center, so that your deployment
can be expedited.Experts estimate this: one to three months for a web-hosted SaaS application; 18 months for a licensed, in-house application. In some
cases, the launch can take place in less than 30 days.
Get the Latest Innovations
If you’ve
licensed software to build your platform within, you’ll have to wait for new
releases to implement platform improvements. Updates such as this are
continuously evolving in the engineering departments of SaaS providers. You’ll
receive new social media tools and new versions of existing tools much sooner.
Also, SaaS vendors generally perform rigorous Q&A testing and deploy
corrective updates in early morning hours to reduce interruptions to your
users.
Is the SaaS Trend a Lasting
One?
The quality and reliability of SaaS solutions continues to improve month by month. A 2008 survey of 260 firms around the globe by Gartner states
that close to 90% of the organizations polled said they expect to maintain or
grow their relationships with SaaS providers. More than 33% indicated they plan
to move on-premises hosting and applications to SaaS vendors.
In fact, in social media, the movement to SaaS solutions is
accelerating, and the benefits above explain a few of the reasons why.
Please comment if you have a SaaS experience to share.
