Software as a Service Benefits for Small Businesses

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Author: Praveen Ortec

Article source: http://www.articledeshboard.com/. Used with author's permission.

Software as a Service (SaaS) model of application delivery is getting really popular now and most companies offering on premise (traditional/installable) software applications are either changing to SaaS model or proposed to do so in future. The major beneficiaries of today's SaaS revolution are small to medium sized businesses (SMBs), which are becoming increasingly competitive by hiring most advanced technologies for much competitive price than their big competitors.

As you may know, there are many factors which make SaaS model of software delivery encouraging for SMBs. As SaaS products are priced as monthly usage fee per user, companies with limited number of employees (software users) get upper hand over big companies. Other advantages of SaaS products include easy to customize property, speedy implementation, web based user interface accessible from any where at any time, availability of wireless and offline editions (not for all), higher user adoption rates, open-source nature (not for all), free automatic software updates, no requirement of in house database, automatic backup and systematic arrangement of enterprise data, minimum requirement of technical skills from the behalf of client companies, integration with existing softwares and systems, and so on.

Today there are only a handful of products which utilized Software as a Service model, but the number of SaaS vendors and products are growing day by day. Most successful SaaS products now available include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, web conferencing systems, Sales Force Automation (SFA) systems, enterprise contact management systems, enterprise data management and data backup systems, VoIP and PBX systems, e-mail management systems, business account management systems, etc. In future, most systems which require communication, data sharing, file management, data security, web site related, marketing and scheduling tools will be changed into SaaS model.

What SaaS model of product delivery ensures is better planning of processes and integration in an enterprise. Because of the fixed monthly fee per user, businesses can easily estimate the expected monthly, quarterly or annual expenditure; and the no hardware or framework requirements eliminate the need of expenditures on difficult-to-estimate costs of setting-up the system, maintenance, updates, system failures, etc. Large and medium sized enterprises, less interested in SaaS, have to spent tremendous amount of money to keeping all similar systems in running conditions; they have to arrange the large initial capital investment, technical support, running support, maintenance costs, data backup systems, etc. This enables SMBs to offer products/services with same quality as big businesses for competitive prices.

But SaaS is not at all problem-free. The major concern is data security and data ownership issues, which are the major preventing factor that many large and medium businesses avoid SaaS. Others include (in case of an established business) wastage of money already invested for setting-up systems and purchasing licenses, unavailability of solutions to solve specific problems or for specific industries, the need of speedy internet connection, etc. But the problems are being solved rapidly and innovative ideas are introduced day by day; giving strong indication of 'SaaS is here to Stay'.

Praveen Ortec recommends eSalesTrack hosted CRM software, which is a leading example of CRM Software as a Service. eSalesTrack is also an Open Source CRM software.