Why SaaS Is Kick­ing Desk­top Soft­ware **s

The days of spend­ing time and money on main­tain­ing desk­top soft­ware will soon pass.

Tak­ing its place is SaaS: Soft­ware as a Ser­vice.

SaaS al­lows you to ac­cess soft­ware func­tions re­motely, of­ten charg­ing a monthly fee. As more busi­nesses make the switch, the ev­i­dence is be­com­ing un­de­ni­able: SaaS is su­pe­rior to desk­top soft­ware in many ways.

SaaS Saves Busi­nesses Time

Set­ting up busi­ness soft­ware can be an ar­du­ous process. De­ploy­ment times can take months, some­times over a year. Be­cause the SaaS ven­dor al­ready has the soft­ware up and run­ning on their server, the de­ploy­ment time is much, much shorter.

SaaS Keeps You Up to Date

Tech­nol­ogy is con­stantly chang­ing, and with it the soft­ware you use to run your busi­ness. Us­ing tra­di­tional means to run your soft­ware keeps you wait­ing. You have to wait for new re­leases to take ad­van­tage of up­grades. Once these up­grades come, you have to go through the whole in­stal­la­tion process again. In some cases the cost of up­grades are so high that you can’t take ad­van­tage of them, leav­ing you and your busi­ness behind.

Work­ing with SaaS elim­i­nates this in­ef­fi­ciency. Be­ing con­stantly con­nected to the software’s ven­dors means that as soon as new in­no­va­tions be­come avail­able, you can take ad­van­tage of them. The up­grade process is on­go­ing, keep­ing you abreast of every change with­out hav­ing to jump through hoops.

SaaS Low­ers Your IT Costs

The over­head costs for im­ple­ment­ing con­ven­tional soft­ware can be im­mense. Many ap­pli­ca­tions re­quire you to pur­chase servers, which in turn puts you in the po­si­tion of need­ing to house and main­tain them. Once the servers are set up, the soft­ware it­self needs to be in­stalled and main­tained. All of this work re­quires ad­di­tional IT per­son­nel, putting ad­di­tional strain on your budget.

All in all, set­ting up tra­di­tional soft­ware can cost just as much (or even more) than pur­chas­ing the soft­ware it­self. Mak­ing the switch to SaaS elim­i­nates many of these costs, sav­ing you tons of money.

SaaS Al­lows You to Pay As You Go

Tra­di­tional soft­ware re­quires you to pay an up-front li­cens­ing fee. This fee can be ex­or­bi­tant, re­quir­ing cap­i­tal that not all busi­nesses have. SaaS al­lows you to pay as you go. Most providers break their fee struc­tures down into a monthly or an­nual fee. This al­lows you to work the costs into your bud­get. It also gives you the flex­i­bil­ity to can­cel if the soft­ware is no longer relevant.

Some types of soft­ware con­tain func­tions and fea­tures that your busi­ness will never use but you will still have to pay for. SaaS side­steps this in­con­ve­nience by of­fer­ing me­tered us­age. This means you pay for what you use, rather than bells and whis­tles you can do without.

SaaS is Flexible

Tra­di­tional soft­ware of­ten makes you com­mit to one fixed ac­count struc­ture. If your or­ga­ni­za­tion is set in stone, this is not a prob­lem. How­ever, most busi­nesses ben­e­fit from flex­i­bil­ity. As your needs change, SaaS al­lows you to add or sub­tract accounts.

A fi­nal ad­van­tage that SaaS can of­fer is the abil­ity to scale to the size of your busi­ness. With tra­di­tional soft­ware, you are forced into a one-size-fits-all box. SaaS is scal­able, al­low­ing you to cus­tomize your ser­vices to the spe­cific needs of your busi­ness. This flex­i­bil­ity also makes it easy to in­te­grate new soft­ware with ex­ist­ing sys­tems, max­i­miz­ing the func­tion­al­ity of both.

The soft­ware tide is turn­ing and SaaS is un­doubt­edly be­com­ing the new stan­dard. Tra­di­tional soft­ware sim­ply can­not com­pete with its flex­i­bil­ity and ease of use. Keep­ing up with this new trend will ben­e­fit your busi­ness both fi­nan­cially and with im­proved per­for­mance. Keep an eye on SaaS in the fu­ture and con­sider it for your next soft­ware purchase.