Published: October 2009 Type: Intellect report Area: Private sector
Summary
You are no doubt familiar with banking, booking trips or buying goods through an internet connection. In each case, the vendor is exposing its application to you as a web-based service. As long as the device you are using can run one of the popular browsers, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Macintosh, a PC, a netbook or a mobile phone.
It’s a short jump from such bespoke services to the idea of a standardised service which could be used by many companies or individuals. Among individuals, standardised services for photo sharing, blogging, social networking and many others are already very popular. You may have heard of Flickr, Wordpress and Facebook, for example. Users can tweak the way their pages are laid out and which options are activated but these services are essentially fixed in their scope, but subject to continuous improvement, usually in the light of user feedback.
You will find parallels and overlaps in the business world where the delivered services have a more professional intent, but they are more or less equal in philosophy. You may have heard of salesforce.com, one of the best known and most successful examples of what is called Software as a Service, or SaaS.
In this paper, the authors (a group of SaaS vendors, IT consultants and lawyers) have set out to illustrate why there is a growing interest in SaaS, why it is having such an impact on both the technology industry and its customers, and why it isn’t really about the technology at all but about service to customer organisation.
This paper assumes that you are a board-level decision maker or purchaser of applications. It shows how and where you may derive benefits from deploying SaaS in your own organisation. It examines the commonly claimed benefits of SaaS such as lowering costs, reducing risk, providing flexibility and reducing reliance on IT. However, it also takes a hard look at the questions that need to be asked before considering SaaS for your own organisation.
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Business case for Software as a Service (PDF 2MB)
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