Is it a good thing to follow the trend? To follow the herd and do what everyone thinks is the best thing to do in a particular situation. Maybe sometimes. Sometimes it is a great alternative to break away and carve a niche for yourselves.
The in-thing in technology today, among many others, is the cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS in combination with cloud technology is gaining wide acceptance among businesses for various applications because of its ease of use. And if you are looking at employing Customer Identity Management platform to tie your loose ends, SaaS with cloud is like burger with coke.
Let’s talk about the burger first. SaaS is one of the subsets of subscription methods with Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service also gaining prominence. SaaS is basically like television. You recharge your account and your service provider deducts your monthly plan cost. Same is the case with SaaS with yearly subscription charges. But traditionalists will contend this a bad idea and a single investment software purchase is always a good choice. Well, they can say whatever they want but businesses not looking to be burdened by a large capex, SaaS is a great choice coupled with the fact that it is always updated with the latest standards in the concerned industry. SaaS vendors wouldn’t be able to find new subscribers if their software was out of date and like the Android OS, all existing users are also bound to get the updates. SaaS is also an ideal package if your IT team is running a little thin.
It is not for nothing that IDC has predicted the SaaS market will grow to generate US$50.8 billion in revenues by 2018. Again, by 2018, about 27.5% of the worldwide enterprise applications market will be SaaS based. You might think the proportion is still low by the amount of hype it is getting but that is because of the fact that the world software market is still dominated by conventional players who only sell licensed products. Well, now that we mentioned licensing, it would only be apt to mention the major drawbacks of conventional software that should push you closer to cloud based SaaS. Traditional software comes with a lot of baggage and requires a lot of work to be done by both sides so there are no wrinkles and after effects. Some of these even include mega legal issues that could prove very costly. Software vendors and buyers often have to grapple with localization issues, jurisdictional issues, newer issues depending on who you are and then compliance issues. It is not without reason that enterprise software companies have huge legal teams.
Now, let’s think about coke. If you are using a CIM platform, which mostly is a cloud based SaaS, it makes sense to migrate to the cloud considering the scalability it offers. This is the age of the small business and small businesses are very quickly becoming big businesses. So if your tactics, strategies and calculation are right and you think you can gain hundreds of thousands of customers in a short period of time, you need to be able to to scale accordingly. And you can’t do that if you have your own servers. But it’s not just servers but a host of other advantages that the cloud brings. Migrating to the cloud is also a quick process that can happen in less than a month and you will good to go.
But, don’t take the burger and coke analogy too seriously. SaaS with cloud is far healthier.