As a business owner, do you constantly worry about maintaining business systems and infrastructure? To run a successful business, you need to be free to focus on your customers and business objectives. For many small and mid-sized businesses, SaaS (Software As A Service) has become the obvious choice for implementing business systems. Is SaaS for you? Read on to find out …
Five reasons why SaaS may be the right choice for you
- There are no upfront capital expenses to buy hardware or recruit IT staff. Since the software is hosted elsewhere, the expensive but critical IT tasks such as maintaining servers, data backups, and disaster recovery measures are no longer needed.
- SaaS vendors typically offer an online free trial. This makes hands-on evaluations fast, affordable and instantly gratifying.
- SaaS is typically subscription based. Users subscribe to the SaaS software with month-to-month or yearly payment options without upfront financial commitments.
- The newer breed of web 2.0 SaaS products offer a greater degree of usability and a superior user experience. This leads to better user adoption with higher chances of implementation success.
- Application upgrades and feature enhancements are automatic and seamless with SaaS. Automatic upgrades in a fully managed application environment were an utopian scenario for the older on-premise installations, where an upgrade often meant re-doing all the customizations.
Five reasons why SaaS may not be the right choice for you
- An obvious but often overlooked requirement for SaaS is that needs an active internet connection. However, this is becoming a non-issue with the advent of mobile technologies where business software is being increasingly consumed from smartphones and tablets.
- For companies with complex customization and integration requirements, SaaS might not be a suitable choice. Integration has always been the Achilles heel for SaaS solutions. They have tried to alleviate this with deeper API capabilities and integration partnerships leading to a value added eco-system of partner created integrated solutions.
- SaaS is also not a suitable choice for companies with concerns over data security and privacy. In many industries, there are additional stricter regulations for privacy that many SaaS solutions might not adhere to. An example would be the HIPAA regulation for the health case industry.
- SaaS has been reported to build up a higher Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) over a long period of time with increasingly long term operating cost.
- Earlier SaaS vendors used to offer only yearly subscriptions with complicated lock-ins and numerous fine prints. However, this trend has changed significantly and nowadays almost everyone offers a month-to-month contract without extra commitments.