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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

July - 2010 - issue > Editor's Desk

Enterprise IT Turning SaaS Way

Jayakishore Bayadi
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Jayakishore Bayadi
The enterprise software industry is in the midst of a new revolution. If we go by industry trends, nowadays customers are reluctant to spend on softwares which are indeed rigid in its applicability and costs too much to install, use, and maintain. Also, enterprise software—software designed to solve enterprise-wide problems rather than those involving only a single department — can be very expensive. There are incidents of customers complaining about their vendors, System Integrators on addressing their problems with their deployed solution.

However, good news is that advent of new technologies like cloud computing, models like Pay-as-you-use are coming into the rescue of the enterprise IT domain which is indeed making the stakeholders to re-think on their role and relevance in the industry. There are some great innovative companies who have built highly flexible, easy to use, and low cost applications that offer customers a simple alternative. Use it and then pay for it if you really use it. Few years ago many customers were still skeptical about this on-premise/off-premise issue, but now many companies have decided pursue the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) way.

Not only the cost. SaaS has many advantages. Instead of the servers sitting in your data center, they reside with your provider. In addition to reducing power usage, and the associated costs, SaaS enterprise software has many other environmentally-sound advantages: a good enterprise software system includes collaboration software, for example. This allows staff to work remotely, thereby lowering the consumption of fossil fuels and pumping less exhaust into the air; reduce the overhead on space and power consumption within the office.

Customer friendliness is the bedrock of the SaaS business model. The real beauty is that the model perfectly aligns the goals of the customer and the vendor in delivering a quality, functional and tested solution. Because SaaS operates in only a single environment, the need to support a multiplicity of different configurations doesn’t exist.
For vendors that means that engineering is free to focus their time on incorporating new functionality, using the constant stream of customer feedback that a large customer base will bring.



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