SaaS refers to software that is accessed via a web browser and is paid on a subscription basis. Different from the traditional model where a customer buys a license to software and assumes ownership for its maintenance and installation, SaaS presents significant advantages to the customer.

SaaS is a new way of using software. There are no hardware, implementation or acquisition costs involved to run the application from the customer’s side. It’s the responsibility of the SaaS vendor (us) to manage and run the application with utmost security, performance and reliability.

Since customers pay a subscription, they have immediate access to the new features and functionality. Unlike traditional softwares where upgrades would happen once a year or once in 6 months (with the vendor coming to your office with a CD), the SaaS vendor continuously pushes new updates, fixes to the application, which is immediately accessible by the customer. This reduces the length of time it takes a customer to recognize value from the software.

That being said, all this benefit does not comes without any challenges:

Technical challenges

The traditional enterprise applications available in the marketplace are usually not architected and designed to run on the SaaS platform for the following reasons:

• They do not have a built-in functionality that is required to support the subscription based hosted service. This functionality includes billing, monitoring, support, and performance related functions.
• The data store of the application is not architected and designed to isolate data of multiple tenants [ tenants are group of clients using the service ]
• The application is not built to support customization of its user interface, business logic, and database by configuration through the browser in such a way that different tenants within the same hosted instance see different behavior of each of these three layers of the application.
• The traditional applications usually do not support security of the sensitive data, which becomes necessary if the application data resides outside the firewall.
• The applications are usually not built to scale for a large number of users. The application scalability is important to cater to the load created by users from multiple tenants of the application using the single runtime instance.

SaaS is still in its growing years and vendors are gearing towards meeting all these challenges. Not only software companies, even hosting companies are growing up and facing the challenges of huge amount of data getting transfered to and fro.

Looking from the past experience, its very clear that we will get solid solutions built and provided to clients in near future.

SaaS can be lucrative for companies who are not technology centric and technology centric alike, with a difference that technology centric companies can still do with using their existing infrastructure to run the application. The decision they need to make is that are their current resources free enough to maintain the software and if they are that free, do these companies even need to carry that burden?

Resources do not come cheap, while a well designed SaaS and a good company running that application can actually come at the fraction of that cost.

To pick up a SaaS vendor you need to ask the following questions:

• Is our data safe with that company?
• Are they capable enough to sustain their business?
• Do they have the infrastructure to keep your data available?
• Do they have enough experience and staff to manage your data, for you?
• What kind of support do they provide?
• Are they open when you are?
• Is there a setup fee for getting started?
• Do they offer customization of the product for you?
• Will the prices remain same in future?
• What about the security of the data?
• What is their data backup policy?
• Do they provide option to integrate their solution into your existing applications, if yes how much do they charge?
• Is there a SLA? What happens if the SLA is not met?
• Whats the exit policy if tomorrow you do not want to continue their service?
• Do they have a backup plan, if their server(s) fails?
• How well do their support staff understands the applications?
• Can they help people or they can only understand the application from the IT perspective?
• Who manages their infrastructure? Do they do it themselves or they have a professional team to manage and ensure smooth operations?
• What kind of compatability features do thier solution offers?
• Is the solution easy to use, do they provide training, if yes, does it costs, if yes, how much?

Well these are some questions that will get you started to dig deep into what the vendor has to offer. Once you have tested the vendor and you are comfortable with working with them, it does makes a lot of sense to go SaaS way:

Minimal Initial Investment

Generally SaaS applications come with Pay-As-You-Go price model i.e. you pay as much as you use, it can’t get better than this. You start up with little to no expense, and pay only for the resources you use. When you start using the application seriously and start to depend on that application, it means the application is of a great value and then you should be paying for the hard work the company has put in to make the application come close to your business and is helping you grow. Even then the solutions generally present in the market are far more economic than building and maintaining one for your own personal use.

Reduced operations cost

You don’t have to employ people to manage servers, good resource comes at a premium and good people will be sitting idle 75% of their time because a good person knows who to get the job done in that time. On the other hand, cheap resource generally means you will be sitting idle 75% of the time without the data that application is supposed to provide you.

Available anywhere

These applications are generally designed to be available through a general web browser, which means your data is available to you 24*7 without you being stuck in office for that long. It makes a huge difference in today’s world that information be accessible to you when you need it. Ask your vendor, how do they handle small screen mobile devices?

I will continue from here in the next part of this blog, I hope this helps you to get a basic idea of how it can be helpful for you to go SaaS and how to choose the correct vendor to be a part of your business.