SaaS (Software as a Service) has many advantages, such as low cost, rapid deployment, and flexible pricing, but it also has its weaknesses in auditing and regulatory compliance, as well as integration with existing enterprise solutions. Enterprises should fully understand these advantages and disadvantages when choosing SaaS.

Software as a Service (SaaS) allows users to use real-time software through the Internet. Since this software has many Web 2.0 features, it can bring users an extremely rich experience and save users' investment. It is very popular in the software market. Research companies such as Gartner and Forrester believe that SaaS is one of the fastest growing areas in the IT industry. SaaS advocates also claim that SaaS provides an alternative to traditional packaged application software for enterprises to achieve their business goals, and it is much more cost-effective than the latter. Today, many well-known suppliers, including Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon, Salesforce.com, etc., provide SaaS solutions. Among them, the main services of providers such as Yahoo, Google, eBay and Amazon focus on meeting the needs of consumers rather than the needs of enterprises, while the solutions provided by Salesforce.com, CollabNet and BEN are designed specifically to solve common enterprise business problems. For example, Salesforce provides solutions for customer relationship management.

Advantages of SaaS

SaaS-based solutions have certain advantages of their own, and enterprises should understand this before deciding to actively adopt such solutions. Advantages include:

■ Reusable;

■ Lower costs;

■ Faster solution delivery;

■ Flexible pricing model that conforms to the development model of the enterprise;

■ Better support;

■ Better solutions;

■ Reducing the IT resources required for the enterprise.

Reusable

One of the biggest advantages of SaaS is "reusable", which is actually the basis of all other advantages of SaaS. If you are sure that your enterprise should use SaaS solutions, you have actually decided not to repeat work, but simply use existing solutions. At the very least, the solution will be quicker and cheaper to implement, and while it may not be the best, it will be "good enough".

Lower-cost solution

If an enterprise adopts a SaaS solution, its cost is likely to be only a fraction of what it would cost to implement, deploy, run, manage and support such a solution on its own. One of the biggest advantages of SaaS solutions is that they can provide very significant economies of scale in terms of price. The reason for this is that most SaaS providers can easily take advantage of their "re-use" advantages in specific industry fields and can provide highly replicable "standardized" solutions. The end result is that they can usually benefit from this re-usability to their customers while achieving significant cost savings.

Solutions can be provided faster

SaaS providers have already planned, designed, implemented, deployed and tested the specific solutions that the enterprise is about to adopt. This means that the enterprise can use existing solutions, which would take a long time for the enterprise to implement on its own. In the case of most SaaS solutions, the software is already running in real time and ready to use. The only "bottleneck" is paying for the service fee and how to connect this tool with your own business processes.

Flexible Pricing

When using SaaS solutions, companies often use a subscription-based, deterministic pricing model that allows companies to purchase the services they need when they need them. This means that companies can purchase software based on their growth model. When the company grows, they can simply open new connections instead of purchasing new infrastructure and resources. And when the company shrinks, they can simply close the connection. In this way, companies can avoid being burdened with too much infrastructure and resources, which traditionally have to continue to be managed and supported even if you no longer need them.

Better Support

When using SaaS solutions, companies are likely to use solutions provided, managed and supported by experts who focus on a specific area 24×7. In many ways, the provider is equivalent to a real-time extension of the company. In fact, connecting to a SaaS provider is a very low-cost way for users. As long as you are connected, the resources provided by SaaS are always at your service, which is equivalent to expanding the resources of the company.

Reduces IT resources required for enterprises

Usually, you only need to use a browser to connect to the SaaS provider's hosting platform, so all the infrastructure users need is a device to run the browser and a simple network that allows the device to access the Internet. This means that enterprises do not have to provide, operate, manage and support their own internal infrastructure. For very small enterprises that do not want to manage the complexity of their own IT departments, SaaS is undoubtedly an effective solution that helps speed up the implementation of enterprise solutions while minimizing the required IT resources.