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Software as a service (or SaaS) is a way of delivering applications over the Internet—as a service. Instead of installing and maintaining software, you simply access it via the Internet, freeing yourself from complex software and hardware management.

SaaS applications are sometimes called Web-based software, on-demand software, or hosted software. Whatever the name, SaaS applications run on a SaaS provider’s servers. The provider manages access to the application, including security, availability, and performance.

Examples of popular SaaS products:

• Google Workspace
• Salesforce
• Trello
• Zoom
• DocuSign
• Slack
• Adobe Creative Cloud
• Mailchimp
• Netflix
• Spotify

An excellent way to understand the SaaS model is to think of it like a bank. A bank protects each customer’s privacy while providing reliable, secure, and efficient service. SaaS does the same.

The SaaS model helps your business use its resources more efficiently. By harnessing the power of SaaS features, your business will improve customization, lower costs and become better connected to those who matter. The application achieves this through four customizable SaaS characteristics.

SaaS Characteristics

SaaS Multi-Tenant Architecture

Multi-tenancy is an architecture where all SaaS vendor clients and applications share a single, common infrastructure and code base that is centrally maintained. This architecture allows vendors to innovate more quickly, saving development time previously spent on maintaining outdated code.

Easy Customization with SaaS

Users can easily customize applications to fit their business processes without affecting the shared infrastructure. A SaaS model supports each user and company’s unique customizations changes and preserves them through regular upgrades. This means SaaS providers can make upgrades more often, with less customer risk and lower adoption costs.

Better Access From Network Devices

A SaaS model allows your business to remotely access data from any networked device, making it easy to manage privileges, monitor data use, and ensure many users can see the same information simultaneously.

SaaS Harnesses the Consumer Web

Anyone familiar with Amazon.com or My Yahoo! will be familiar with the Web interface of typical SaaS applications. With the SaaS model, you can customize with point-and-click ease, making the weeks or months it takes to update traditional business software seem hopelessly old-fashioned.

SaaS Features

If reducing costs and growing your business is a priority, utilizing SaaS features will allow sales and business teams to engage more effectively with stakeholders as well as existing and prospective clients. Here are the top 5 ways SaaS features can improve your business.

1. Boost lead management through better identification and monitoring during the sales cycle.
2. Improve sales and marketing collaboration by capturing and sharing prospect and customer insights better.
3. Improves marketing automation by streamlining your digital marketing campaigns.
4. Improves data management.
5. Improves contact management through better storing, organizing and tracking of information about your customers, prospects and sales leads.

SaaS v On-Premises Software

In the past, businesses bought and relied on packaged software; however, this “on-premises” software had several drawbacks.

The Drawbacks of On-Premises Packaged software:

• Requires in-house systems that need to be regularly upgraded by an internal IT department.
• Requires frequent maintenance that can lead to IT word pressure and bottlenecks for projects.
• Architecture and coding differences can make it difficult when integrating multiple systems.
• Increased upfront software, licensing and server costs.
• The CRM software and hardware costs could make it unaffordable for small businesses or challenging to scale up quickly in response to growth or change.

Learn more about Sales Cloud and how a cloud-based CRM can support business growth.

Due to the increased efficiency and cost-effectiveness of software as service applications, many businesses turn to cloud-based SaaS for solutions. Why?

1. Low Set Up and Infrastructure costs:
   You only pay for what you need, so it is a very cost-effective solution for all-sized businesses.
2. Scalability:
   You can adapt your requirements to the number of people who need to use the system, the volume of data and the functionality required as your business grows.
3. Accessible from Anywhere:
   Just connect to the internet, and you can work from wherever you need to be via desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile or other networked devices.
4. Automatic, frequent updates:
   Providers offer timely improvements thanks to their scale and because they receive feedback about what their customers need. This frees up your IT department for other, more business-critical tasks.
5. Security at the highest level required by any customer:
   Because of the shared nature of the service, all users benefit from the security level set up for those with the highest need.

Procurement™:
Get in front of your target market and ideal clients/suppliers with this marketplace platform.

Cloud computing and SaaS have come a long way in helping companies develop end-to-end integrated solutions. With increasing awareness and uptake, organisations are developing SaaS integration platforms (or SIPs) for building additional SaaS applications.

SaaS is one of several cloud computing solutions for business IT issues. Other ‘as-a-Service’ options include:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – the provider hosts hardware, software, storage and other infrastructure components
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Everything as a service (XaaS) – which is essentially all the “aaS” tools neatly packaged together.

The payment model for these kinds of services is typically a per-seat, per-month charge based on usage – so a business only has to pay for what they need, reducing upfront costs.

With companies adopting various “aaS” services, long-term relationships with service providers will grow, leading to innovation as customers’ evolving needs are understood and provided for. SaaS may one day help address critical business challenges, such as predicting which customers will churn or which cross-selling practices work best.

With the need for high-volume data, software performance and backup increasing daily, it’s easy to see why so many businesses are choosing to outsource to cloud-based providers. If you’re considering moving to a SaaS platform, find out what Salesforce has to offer for businesses of all sizes.