Lowering overheads with SaaS

No more than ever, a key objective for most companies is to improve the efficiency of their operations and productivity with limited resources and a constrained capital budget. While it’s a great idea to empower staff by providing them with powerful and effective business collaboration and communication tools, it’s not so easily achieved.

Until recently any proposal like this would have faced considerable obstacles: a system built and managed in-house along conventional lines typically requires a considerable upfront investment in IT infrastructure, IT resources, and maintenance. Though Infrastructure spend is largely a one off cost, maintenance and management will be continuous fixed costs over the life of the platform.
Contrast this with a SaaS model, in which the vendor operates and owns the application, and takes responsibility for hardware, software, maintenance and upgrades. Recent studies by respected industry analysts have shown that SaaS has a far lower cost to implement with less economic impact overall than an installed system.

One of the ways in which that economic impact is lowered stems from the inherent flexibility and efficiency that SaaS provides. Because most SaaS solutions are charged per user per month, the customer benefits from an inherent flexibility over usage costs that simply can’t be achieved with perpetual subscription, in-house applications. When times are good, the seat count and the quantity of applications in use will rise. In a down turn, monthly fees can be adjusted in line with immediate needs of the business by scaling back usage.  This agility can have profound implications for the way senior management plan the operations of their business.
Because SaaS systems are generally Web based, deployments are typically far simpler. The requirements per desktop are far lower, often eliminating the need for software to be installed on each machine. Where local software is necessary, bulk install ‘push to desktop’ tools are essential, as are the experience to handle things like migration of old emails.

This is not to underestimate the planning required to migrate to in-house mission critical applications to SaaS across an entire organisation, particularly larger ones. In these cases the track record of the SaaS vendor in deploying Enterprise solutions within a project led methodology is critical. Just like choosing a partner for an in-house installation, their approach and resources must clearly scale to meet the needs of the customer’s business. If the vendor specialises in SMEs then a large corporation should tread carefully. Having said that, a formal, project led deployment is not normally charged as a major additional cost, but this must be clarified before purchase.