Managed service providers and value-added resellers in the Australian marketplace develop different plans to succeed in business. Do many include making money from selling software-as-a-service? I doubt it.
With all this noise about cloud, it can be difficult to understand SaaS and cloud for what they actually are – more tools to achieve our original plans for growing IT businesses.
Let’s start with why the cloud exists.
SaaS is a great way of delivering innovative services to many people reliably, simply and cost effectively.
When SaaS is done right the vendor invests into building services with best practice implementation to ensure reliability – and through their success can cost effectively deliver the service to many people.
Customers of SaaS should experience a simpler delivery model where they no longer need to purchase hardware, software and implementation services to achieve their otherwise complicated computing requirements.
Examples of successful SaaS models locally are email filtering (for spam and virus), accounting software (Saasu/Xero), CRM (Salesforce/NetSuite), feature rich email services (Gmail/Managed Exchange), and knowledge sharing (Confluence, SharePoint and Wikis). Where the wheels fall off is when SaaS is poorly implemented, and this can result in services which do not achieve the SaaS promise of reliability, innovation and simplicity.
(Also, SaaS on its own without the right support systems for the market, direction and ongoing innovation is by virtue of the model unlikely to succeed.)
Now, this is all great for the end user, but not many IT businesses rejoice at the thought of their customers using less hardware, less software and not requiring installation or maintenance services – that is, unless the IT company is the one responsible for paying for all of this.
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
