SaaS – things to consider

Using SaaS, organizations have potentially limitless possibilities for running applications that may not have been otherwise possible given the limitations of their corporate systems, infrastructure, or resources. If the right middleware and associated components are deployed, SaaS can present massive incentives and benefits. Organizations can quickly realize benefits from scalability, flexibility, and on-demand self-service capabilities. Customer adoption accelerates as access to data and applications can be from virtually anywhere, at any time with internet access. Additional benefits include:

• Cost control, cost reduction
• Licensing or support becomes a built-in component for the provider and the subscriber benefits from economies of scale
• The purchasing of up-front bulk licensing and the associated capital expenditure is removed and replaced by demand-based pay-as-you-go licensing models
• User-based internal support requirements reduce significantly as the software cloud service provider can typically handle more of the support at scale
• Ease of use and limited administration
• Automatic updates and patch management
• Improved security
• Standardization and compatibility 
• Global accessibility

Notable providers of SaaS include Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP.