Guest Column

A Seat At The Table
By Peter Yorke, Founder & Independent Consultant, Yorke Communications Private Limited

The SaaS model ensures customers have their say in the future of their enterprise applications.

As an On Demand delivery model, SaaS has become a proven software deployment model across verticals for its inherent benefits for core IT processes and applications, where it provides the advantages of knowledge based customer engagement, centralized control and simplified operations.

Costs Less. Does More.

The SaaS concept, as opposed to the traditional model, puts customers in the center and allows them to chart their own software roadmap and route to operational success. From the customer’s point of view, a traditional, on-premise software environment alienates the users from their vendor. With the entire gamut of operations confined to the user environment, the vendor is unable to gauge enterprise demands and future business and knowledge trends, and thus is seldom in a position to respond suitably to enterprise growth. Furthermore, clients are wary of software upgrades for fear of it disrupting their businesses especially if they are multi-locational and core to the operations of the company.

A SaaS environment, in contrast, relieves them of this worry by providing a common code base platform with iterative update processes, thereby alleviating business disruptions, and providing immediate benefits to customers. It is therefore easy to understand why SaaS is able to provide a faster and more economical way for organizations to deploy, run and utilize software. Be it in the realm of data management, user training, implementation across systems, hosting of applications, user support, security, or other professional services.

SaaS Solutions. No More a Puzzle.

To begin with, the SaaS model is ideally, meant for those with distributed or multi-unit operations. SaaS is also well-suited for those seeking technology solutions but are restricted by huge technology hardware budgets and infrastructure investments. An overview of the benefits offered by SaaS, in the context of the current economic climate, does make a strong case for SaaS as an attractive option for organizations across verticals.

1. SaaS based solutions effectively help business through unfavorable economic situations, and focus on core strategic issues, through cost effective solutions that include minimized setup costs and exemption from having to manage in-house software infrastructure.
2. SaaS ensures a consistent level of service quality through changing business and knowledge landscapes with a constant backflow of process information from its client specific setups.
3. The SaaS model offers lower subscription fees for licensing, hosting and management activities by merging overall hardware and software maintenance expenses.
4. The scalable and robust nature of SaaS enables enterprises to make staffing reorganizations while efficiently managing the scope of the software solution, without resource wastages.
5. Another feature of SaaS is the cost advantage it delivers thanks to economies of scale. What this means is that savings that SaaS solutions providers make on their hardware and software investment, which they do, are passed on to you, the final user.

Lifecycle of a SaaS Provider.

Once operating in relative isolation, today, the life cycle of a SaaS provider is intricately bound with its clients, with the provider taking a proactive role in user process knowledge, essential real time feedback, and essentially supporting the client with changing business trends by updating and upgrading its services accordingly. SaaS has come a long way since its nascent days:

• Growing up to Multi-tenant Applications: In the early days of SaaS, the main focus was on how to deliver an existing enterprise product as a turnkey business solution to a multi-tenant environment. This approach found increased acceptance among SMBs that had burnt their fingers with the traditional software model.
• Providing New Solutions to Old Problems: Once established in the enterprise vendors club, the inherent advantages offered by the SaaS model were utilized using a centrally hosted architecture to provide solutions to problems deemed unsolvable through traditional software models.
• Enterprise Knowledge Provider: Through interactions and process analyses, SaaS providers now have a better view of how their applications are being used, and how this knowledge can be presented to the client, to give them insights for performance and industry benchmarks.

It follows that by analyzing and leveraging the information assets produced by the SaaS provider, clients can gain access to a treasure trove of knowledge otherwise unavailable through conventional models. This information could be used for developing functionalities, providing greater efficiencies, and adapting to emerging needs.

Find The Table. Choose Your Seat.

The relevant benefits offered by this model for the current economic climate make it an effective business model for knowledge based enterprises, a fact substantiated by its growing acceptance rates over the past few years. As it stands now, the market for SaaS this year is expected to hit $8 billion, a 21.9 percent increase from last year. In fact, it is expected that the market will show a consistent growth through 2013 for worldwide SaaS revenue to hit a total of $16 billion for the enterprise application market.

In spite of the general perceptions towards in-house outsourcing operations, most forward looking enterprises advocate the case for a SaaS model as a healthy software deployment model, because not only does this relieve them of hefty infrastructural setup fees, it also makes sure the provider is on his toes for providing updates and upgrades for changing business trends.

It is increasingly clear that with lower management costs, and advanced knowledge benefits, SaaS offers client enterprises an able testing ground to test the efficacy of new applications and technologies before embarking on subsequent investments and enterprise-wide implementations. Moreover, with tighter capital budgets demanding leaner alternatives, the acceptance of SaaS as an enterprise resource provider will only continue to grow and evolve. Explains why when it comes to staying in control of your software requirements, analysis and operations, you sure can expect a seat at the head of the table.

About the author

Peter is founder and independent consultant at Yorke Communications Private Limited, an organization that builds content as a platform for internal and external communications. Peter strongly believes that the basis for generating leads, building market image or cementing relations with customers and employees is through good and sustained content.
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