Software As A Service | SAAS

Software As A Service or SAAS is a software delivery model that is available to anyone on demand. The customer needs to pay on the basis of per unit time of usage of the software.

Why SaaS is needed?

Some business may need certain software for only few hours every week or every month. Thus owning the software completely may not be a good idea as it is going to incur extra budget, extra professional resource for managing and maintaining the software. You also need to make sure to keep it free from virus and upgraded as well as updated. For just few hours of use overburdening the business with so many activities may be cumbersome and uneconomical.

 

Software as a service is a perfect model for such business units. When software is required get it on demand from the third party service provider, use it and then release it.

 

It’s as simple as renting a car. Suppose you want to go on a vacation then you don’t plan to buy a car first. You simply rent it. Go on vacation, return back and then release the car back to the owner. It is also a pay per usage model rather than owning a required entity. It serves your purpose and turns out to be economical as well. Same is applicable to the software’s in SaaS model as well.

 

Saas Examples

• Cisco Webex 
• Salesforce
• Proffesional Email Services (eg. Microsoft Office 365)
• Google Apps
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Advantages of SaaS

• SaaS helps shift the ownership of the software to service provider thus the cost of purchasing it as well.
• SaaS model shifts the responsibility of activities like software maintenance, upgrade, security, etc to the provider rather than the software user.
• SaaS reduces the cost of software usage thus turning out to be economical for the business.
• SaaS helps the software service to reach to large number of people who may not have been financially sound to purchase it.

Disadvantages of SaaS

• You cannot make any changes to existing functionality to meet the changing requirement of your business. For this you need to be dependent on third party service provider who may need time to customize it as per your personal need. It may also incur extra cost.