Software as a service (SaaS)—a way to subscribe to software on-demand—is a delivery model that can provide increased operational and financial flexibility and reduced maintenance and technology support. It can help solve business and IT problems and deliver benefits such as speed to value, lower total cost of ownership, increased user adoption and greater employee productivity.
Why Are Organizations Turning to SaaS and the Cloud?
With its low costs and substantial benefits, including faster application deployment, greater flexibility and improved employee productivity, SaaS take-up is skyrocketing, especially across customer relationship management and human capital management.
Leveraging SaaS and the cloud can provide a fundamentally better model to drive change for both the business and IT, providing benefits from innovations previously not possible with on-premise technology and that contribute to the achievement of high performance.
Leading organizations are using SaaS to bring solutions to supply chain management, common desktop applications and digital content creation software. They are further pushing boundaries to achieve additional benefits from SaaS and cloud, including:
- Reducing redundancies and achieving economies of scale in run and maintenance costs by migrating applications to the cloud.
- Extending usability benefits to indirect channels via new SaaS ecosystems to collaborate in ways that were not possible before with on-premise technology.
- Incorporating SaaS as part of the overall architecture in new business and IT operating models to improve operations and lower costs.
- Achieving more impactful results by using the agility of the SaaS model to test and prove a hypothesis for a business case that is fluid—versus one that is carve in stone.
- Securing a true 360-degree view of the customer by incorporating social networking SaaS technologies to provide a better customer experience.
How are leading organizations achieving these benefits? Long-term returns from SaaS are attained by cultivating the appropriate mindset—just get started, be fast and flexible, and don’t over customize—and by using the right planning and governance to help realize the potential for rapid speed to value and long-term business transformation.
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