Software as a Service (SaaS) is also known as Software on Demand. It is the new concept to deliver the software products and its usages to the customer. Traditionally, the software products have been delivered to the customer in CDs and the client used to install them in his desktop or server. There have been many disadvantages with this system for both the client as well as the software vendor.
Drawbacks to the Buyer
The main drawback in the old system is that the shopper must pay the full price for the product even when he makes use of only sure functionalities of that software. Secondly, he needs to continuously update the products each time a patch or new model is released. This imposes additional financial burden as well as technical issues resembling backward compatibility. The other drawback is once he purchased software from a particular vendor, he’s struck with the same vendor. Even if the product does not meet his expectations, he doesn’t have any alteration. He is fully depending on the same vendor for all supports.
Drawbacks to the Vendor
The vendor additionally has lot of problems with the old system. At any time when a patch or new model is released, he must provide help for various platforms. This ultimately will increase his production and distribution cost. Since differential pricing shouldn’t be doable in this model, vendor costs the identical price for each consumer irrespective his utilization level. Due to this person who makes use of very little options also ends paying more. Another problem is as a lot of the users are technically navies the vendor must provide support at customer places for set up and breakdowns, which improve his operational cost.
SaaS and its advantages
SaaS model enables the distributors to release the product as a service. The vendor has complete control over the product as it is hosted by him at his server and used by the purchasers via their computers remotely. User can use the software as a service, either by paying a periodical subscription or by paying as per usage. A Vendor provides varied service standards equivalent to Gold, Silver, Bronze, and so on according to the requirements and capacity of the customer. User also can select the features which he wants and pay only for the features he uses.
The vendor has full control over the product; he installs upgrades and sets the features at customer desktop via distant managed procedures. This reduces the distribution cost and also saves a tremendous quantity of time. One other advantage is because the buyer makes use of the software on real time he can instantly log the errors, bugs and drawback immediately and this helps the company fix them quickly. Though SaaS appears to be comparable with its predecessor ASP, both will not be the same. ASP model provided the organization to move their application to a third party server, where as SaaS provides shared applications which could be accessed by different users from their desktops. The ever increasing demand for SasS among the many users is because of its simplicity and the associated fee effectiveness drives more and more vendors in to this domain with better products. This heralds a paradigm shift within the software delivery and zakarian01 changes the game completely.