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What's SaaS?  
Software as a service (or SaaS) is a way of delivering applications over the Internet—as a service. Instead of installing and sustaining software, you merely access it via the Internet, releasing yourself from complex software and hardware management.  
  
SaaS applications are typically 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, together with security, availability, and performance.  
  
SaaS Characteristics  
A good way to understand the SaaS model is by thinking of a bank, which protects the privateness of every customer while providing service that's reliable and secure—on a massive scale. A bank’s clients all use the same financial systems and technology without worrying about anybody accessing their personal information without authorisation.  
  
A "bank" meets the key characteristics of the SaaS model:  
  
Multitenant Architecture  
A multitenant architecture, in which all customers and applications share a single, common infrastructure and code base that's centrally maintained. Because SaaS vendor purchasers are all on the same infrastructure and code base, vendors can innovate more quickly and save the valuable development time previously spent on sustaining quite a few versions of outdated code.  
Easy Customisation  
The ability for each person to simply customise applications to fit their business processes without affecting the common infrastructure. Because of the way SaaS is architected, these customisations are unique to each firm or user and are always preserved by way of upgrades. Meaning SaaS providers can make upgrades more usually, with less buyer risk and far lower adoption cost.  
Higher Access  
Improved access to data from any networked system while making it simpler to manage privileges, monitor data use, and ensure everybody sees the identical information on the same time.  
SaaS Harnesses the Consumer Web  
Anyone acquainted with Amazon.com or My Yahoo! will be familiar with the Web interface of typical SaaS applications. With the SaaS model, you may customise with level-and-click ease, making the weeks or months it takes to update traditional business software appear hopelessly old fashioned.  
SaaS Trends  
Organisations are actually developing SaaS integration platforms (or SIPs) for building additional SaaS applications. The consulting firm Saugatuck Technology calls this the "third wave" in software adoption: when SaaS moves beyond standalone software functionality to develop into a platform for mission-critical applications.  
  
SaaS is one in every 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 component  
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 companies is typically a per-seat, per-month cost primarily based on usage – so a enterprise only has to pay for what they want, reducing upfront costs.  
  
SaaS v packaged software  
Previously, companies purchased and relied on packaged software – from multi-application systems covering spreadsheets, databases and e-mail to specialist packages for particular tasks like project management or enterprise intelligence.  
Packaged software – the drawbacks  
To make use of sales and marketing for instance, a enterprise could have used on-premises software for CRM.  
  
This software needed to be evaluated, purchased, installed, kept safe, maintained and frequently upgraded on in-house systems by the inner IT department.  
Utilizing packaged software positioned a burden on the IT group which may turn right into a bottleneck for projects.  
A business might find yourself needing to assist a wide variety of systems side by side, but discover it tricky to integrate them as they were coded and constructed differently.  
This approach also presented upfront costs for software and licences and probably servers for the software to sit on.  
The prices of the CRM software and hardware would possibly mean it just isn't affordable for small businesses. It is also tough to scale up quickly in response to development or change.  
Study more about Sales Cloud and the benefits of cloud-primarily based CRM  
  
The benefits of SaaS  
Elevated effectivity and value effectiveness are the reasons many companies give for turning to cloud-based mostly SaaS solutions. The advantages include:  
  
Low setup and infrastructure prices  
You just pay for what you want with no capital expenditure that needs to be depreciated on your balance sheet over time.  
  
Accessible from anywhere  
Just hook up with the internet and you can work from wherever that you must be by way of desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile or other networked device.  
  
Scalability  
You'll be able to adapt your requirements to the number of people who want to make use of the system, the volume of data and the functionality required as your small business grows.  
  
Trade leading service level agreements (SLAS) for uptime and performance  
So you have got assurances that the software will be available to use while you want it – a troublesome promise for in-house teams to make.  
  
Automated, frequent updates  
Providers offer timely improvements thanks to their scale and because they obtain feedback about what their prospects need. This frees up your IT department for different more enterprise-critical tasks.  
  
Security at the highest level required by any customer  
Because of the shared nature of the service, all users benefit from the security level that’s been set up for these with the highest need.  
  
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