(SaaS stands for Software-as-a-Service and refers to applications delivered primarily through a web browser. Learn more about SaaS at this site: Basics of SaaS.)

How many SaaS products do we use? At last count, five: for Customer-facing tasks like CRM/SFA (sales and customer service); for managing marketing distributions (marketing); for online registration processes (marketing); for managing our R&D backlog, defect-tracking, and release scheduling (R&D); and, you guessed it, for automated accounts payable (financials).

We’re looking into a few more: for core financials; for network monitoring and management; and for project management.  Why?

We’ve found that it’s far easier to scope, evaluate, and implement SaaS solutions that the traditional client-server alternatives. We’ve also found that once a company has more than 75-100 customers, they’ve figured out the major delivery and support issues. (Be careful if a company has less than that; they may not know whether they can scale it up, and in many cases, can’t.) In almost every case we notice improved support, availability, performance, and pace of new feature delivery when compared to the previous option.

We think choosing these solutions has to do with why we’ve been able to move as fast as we have as an organization. SaaS offerings are, for us, always the first option.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 5:58 am and is filed under Software-as-a-Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.