Sadhan’s Blog

Gone are the days of traditional vendors selling, installing in every machine and signing up a maintenance contract and support with the buyer for software such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The traditional licensed vendor is thus on the orbit to face stiff competition from SaaS (Software as a Service) business model. In no time SaaS aims to be the Hobson’s choice in the field of software, apart from being closer to SOA path.

So what exactly is SaaS? Lets dive into deep of it!

SaaS is nothing but an assortment of software services hosted in the internet by a vendor or a service provider, and is made available to the end user through a network over the internet. The end user or the client uses SaaS through a monthly subscription, thus marking an end to complete ownership of the software. With this rental model, it reduces customer acquisition cost of licensed software coupled with its complexity and provides with greater flexibility to choose vendors providing with SaaS. My old friends can relate some old concept or another terminology which were quite popular in recent past called ‘ASP’ or Application Service Provider. So, we can say SaaS is more redefined version of ASP. With the market demand of SOA based solutions, SaaS can go hand in hand with this.

Key Features of SaaS:

• A Low cost business software.

• Available to customers through internet and is managed by SaaS vendors only. Thus, customers have access to the application remotely.

• Traditional vendors sold software as a product; the emerging technology uses Software as a service.

• Applications are managed, upgraded and controlled through remote servers and not on individual machines.

• Customers need not support multiple versions and platforms, as SaaS typically works on multi-tenant architecture.

• The characteristic features are configurability, scalability and most importantly multi-tenant efficiency.

• For optimal performance of SaaS business models, virtualization techniques need to be incorporated.

Benefits of SaaS model:

• Accessibility from anywhere and everywhere.

• Managed and administered in easy manner.

• It gets automatically updated.

• All users can have access to same version, thus being more compatible.

SaaS success is best reflected in markets that cater to the need of video conferencing, human resource, accounting, e-mail management, web content management and many more…but we need to keep our eyes open to find that to what extent SaaS can sustain and position itself in this emerging technology market-space.   

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