From my previous post, we committed to detailing the 5 characteristics of true SaaS. In this post, we’ll look at the first characteristic; On-Demand Services.
Saas solutions are designed from the ground up for maximum network performance, which can mean better application availability than traditional on-site systems. Saas solutions also offer optimized performance that can adapt to your needs. What does this mean? Three basic things.
First, If there is a spike in your business, On-Demand Service through SaaS automatically adjusts and dynamically provisions additional resources to handle the surge. Here’s two examples.
- During and shortly after a natural disaster, there’s going to be a huge spike in service requests for a city—powerlines down, flooding, etc. Their IT department’s infrastructure is likely going to see diminishing digital performance due to the increased requests. They simply can’t deploy additional capacity quick enough to handle the increased demand.
- You’re in the business of selling toilet paper. A pandemic hits and demand, for some unknown, crazy reason spikes to unprecedented levels. Demand on your digital environment explodes overnight. Your on-prem environment simply can’t keep up.
With SaaS, resources are instantaneously and automatically deployed by your service provider to manage the increased workload. There’s no need to procure additional server capacity and necessary support infrastructure as it’s automatically provisioned, again, by the service provider. The net result is there’s no disruption in business, allowing you to maintain the highest level of customer satisfaction and most importantly, people can buy more than one roll of toilet paper at a time!
Second, On -Demand Services means Saas solutions provide real-time data that can be accessed anywhere, at any time. That means your staff can see accurate information on laptops, smartphones, and tablet devices while they travel or telecommute—all without extra setup fees or ongoing costs. Using the above examples, with On-Demand Services with SaaS, any digital change would be reported in real-time to IT staff, reducing the business disruptions. Not only in real-time, but without the need to be “logged into the system” as remember, On-Demand Service means real-time, anywhere, anytime. Real-time, on-demand reporting and analytics are built into SaaS deployments, whereas on-prem deployments require a 3rd party reporting/analytical overlay solution for this to be accomplished.
Third, every software deployment takes time and requires careful planning, but SaaS solutions offer clear advantages when you consider speed of deployment. Since SaaS requires no additional hardware and no upfront license purchase, you don’t have to waste time procuring and installing IT infrastructure and huge upfront licensing fees when scaling up. You easily roll it out across multiple business units, avoiding the above-mentioned cost associated with those rollouts. Example: Let’s say you’ve fully digitized your financials and you now want to do the same for procurement. With on-prem, you’re going to require procurement of additional IT infrastructure and pay an upfront cost of licenses. With SaaS, you simply add licenses without any additional upfront costs and there’s no need for additional IT infrastructure. In short, SaaS gives you the speed and flexibility to add more users as your business changes and grows without huge upfront investments . Non-Saas solutions don’t offer the same freedom. One other note here. There are advantages if the converse happens too—the need to scale down. With SaaS, you simply decommission the licenses without any loss of the huge upfront investment and the IT infrastructure is automatically resized. With on-prem, you lose the that huge license investment and you must either repurpose the hardware infrastructure or dispose of it and potentially lose that investment as well.
On-Demand Service improves the speed and flexibility of all aspects of the business which the application is serving as well as reduces IT costs. It gives your organization increased reporting productivity and enables staff to focus on strategic activities like spend analysis, employee satisfaction, supply chain optimization and more. On-Demand Service opens the door to increased scalability and new technologies that allow you make more accurate and more timely decisions.