Software as a Service (SaaS) is now the main driving force for the competitiveness of small to medium businesses. With SaaS solutions, small businesses now have access to most advanced systems for managing their businesses. Statistics show that within next 3 to 4 years Software as a Service products will constitute more than 30% of all business software solutions; and this percentage will be over 50 for most small businesses. Many new SaaS vendors are coming up and new features and products are introduced day by day. The popularity of SaaS can be readily noticed from the SaaS offering of many traditional application providers like MicroSoft and Oracle.

The main advantages of Software as a Service systems are their cost-effectiveness and short-term ROI. SaaS solutions do not need cost for installation, purchasing, database management, software maintenance, and setting up in-house computer network. Software are subscribed over internet on pay-as-you-go basis. The SaaS vendor is responsible for hosting all data and providing advanced tools for communication, data sharing and analysis. All the updates are usually free and are automatically done. The pricing is usually per user per month. Thus once the expected number of users estimated, companies can easily budget their expenses for subscribing to a SaaS product; remember there is no coast of maintaining the system and solving unexpected crashes, virus attacks, etc.

Except the above two advantages, there are many things which make SaaS solutions highly beneficial for small and medium sized companies. They include 24/7 accessibility from any where there internet, minimum technical knowledge requirements, high capacity of customization, advanced and up-to-date tools, high mobility, easy integration with most other business applications, easy web-based user inference, powerful analysis tools which otherwise take much of your computer space, event and strategy planning and scheduling tools, no need for manually updating the database and for manual data backup, high availability open-source solutions, and much more. But the range and number of advantages one enterprise may get will depend on the SaaS solution it chooses and how effectively it is implemented.

Now Software as a Service products are available for automating many business processes. Common SaaS products include on-demand CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software solutions, web conferencing systems, data-sharing, data back-up and data-management tools, SFA (Sales Force Automation) solutions, account management software, customer/business contact management solutions, etc. You can find both specialized and generalized SaaS solutions. Specialized SaaS solutions suits particular industries but are rare to find and are less flexible. Generalized systems are systems which standard and added features which are extremely flexible to customize.

Two main factors limiting the growth of SaaS industry are enterprise data security issues and increased cost with business growth (increased number of SaaS users). There are also many companies which have implemented similar traditional systems and are now not willing to waste the infrastructure they developed.

About the Author

Praveen Ortec recommends eSalesTrack hosted CRM software, which is a leading example of CRM Software as a Service. eSalesTrack is also an Open Source CRM software.

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