What is SaaS?
Software as a service is an online application developed, maintained and hosted centrally by a software company. This software company uses the one to many model for the delivery of the application and provides complete customer support & technical maintenance to its users. The company is also responsible for all up gradations of the software, introduction of new business rules and security of end users information. On the other hand, the end users lease the software using a subscription plan or ‘pay-as-you-go’ model. This saves the end user from hassles of downloading and installing complex single user applications, maintaining them and finally a lot of time and money. And the best part – the web availability of the application enables you use it anywhere, anytime just like your emails.
Advantages of SaaS?
There have been a number of applications available in the market for single users for quite long. But with the evolution of SaaS applications, the market has boomed and the number of netizens increased exponentially. Let’s see some of the key benefits of SaaS that is driving customers to use SaaS applications:
- Easy access – Anywhere.. Anytime – The online availability of the application makes it easy to use from anywhere and anytime, just like your mails. The users of the application can access the same application, same documents, same information from anywhere in the world.
- Fast Setup – Most of the SaaS applications expect you to register, pay a nominal subscription fee and gives you access to the application in couple of minutes. Thus, you save a lot of time in setting up the software.
- No up gradations/No Maintenance – The software company (vendor) is responsible for all upgrades, technical maintenance and customer support. These applications are usually built for millions of users. Thus the end user is saved from installing new updates/ upgrades every now and then; even if the number of users increases manifolds.
- Low Setup Cost – The end user pays a nominal fee to the software vendor to start using its complete services. Thus, a software which would have been very expensive for the end user including maintenance cost, hardware cost and software licensing is reduced to a very low subscription amount.
- Overall savings – The end users of SaaS application save a huge amount of money on hardware, software licensing, support staff, maintenance and up gradation costs, overall administration, etc.
- No restriction on company size – The biggest benefit of SaaS application is that its features can be used by company of any size, be the number of end users in a company be 1, 10, 100, 1000 or more. The same list of features is available to all irrespective of the strength of the company.
SaaS applications available in the market: