This is the final installment of a three part series on Software as a Service (SaaS). The first article, SaaS: An Idea Whose Time Has Finally Come , explored the evolution of SaaS as a viable alternative to in-house application hosting.
A follow-up article, titled The SaaS Steamroller and Enterprise Software Vendors details the reasons why SaaS is competing effectively against traditional application software vendors. This article will take a look at the state of SaaS in the marketplace today, its pros and cons, and the reasons why companies should consider SaaS as an option for delivering business services.
SaaS Business Drivers
It is no secret that IT executives are reevaluating their application delivery options. Outsourcing is a trend that has yielded mixed results. Amidst complaints of language roadblocks, security questions, and cultural differences, the bloom has largely faded from the outsourcing rose. However, CIOs are still seeking a magic bullet that will help them provide quality business services with minimal downside. While the bad news is that there is no magic bullet, the good news is that the SaaS option is coming of age.
The drivers for SaaS include cost, risk, staffing concerns and complexity. Most CIOs are re-evaluating delivery models in an effort to reduce the 60-to-80 percent of budget typically spent on IT administration and support. Risk mitigation is another, with new reports of security breaches and data theft surfacing in specific business sectors almost weekly.
Staffing is a growing concern as well, with salaries rising and hot skills such as security analysts and enterprise architects in short supply. Information Week recently reported that IT professionals are earning higher salaries than at any time in the ten years. And IT complexity continues to mount, impacting all of these areas.
In this climate, SaaS becomes increasingly attractive, particularly for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). In addition to providing a high quality of service at an often reasonable price, SaaS gives these companies an opportunity to benefit from expertise that might otherwise be beyond their reach.
SaaS companies are hiring some of the industry’s best and brightest experts, whose salaries are then shared across multiple companies. Such expertise is beyond the reach of smaller IT shops whose limited budgets dictate that they hire IT generalists capable of wearing multiple hats. For such companies, SaaS mitigates the security and performance risks inherent in in-house hosting while offloading complex activities such as installing, configuring and maintaining applications. And while protection of intellectual property and personal data are proving to be significant concerns in the offshore world, SaaS has so far presented few such problems.
In short, SaaS is turning into a cost effective option that can be a lower-risk alternative to outsourcing and offshoring. It’s no wonder that companies such as Salesforce.com report growth in the neighborhood of 50-to-75 percent per year.
SaaS in the Marketplace
What kinds of applications are being delivered as services these days? Nearly any application imaginable. A short list includes:
Concur: Online travel management and expense reporting.
Salesforce.com: Best known for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, Salesforce.com also offers a hosting platform for third party vendors to develop and deliver their own online applications.
Symantec: Although Symantec is best known for its Norton and Veritas lines, it began offering online backup in the spring of 2007 and plans to host additional services in the future.
Jamcracker: Aggregation platform that allows service providers to integrate multiple web-based services for resale.
Klir: IT monitoring and analytics.
RightNow: Online CRM services.
Akamai: Hosted acceleration for web-based applications. Akamai operates an “Internet within the Internet” that accelerates the performance of widely distributed online applications.
Workday: Hosted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) services.