A research by Blissfully has shown that HR as a department, is the biggest adopter of SaaS (Software as a Service). In the actual fact, 30% more than the nearest department which is Dev Ops. The same research also shows that the number of SaaS vendors has sharply increased in the last 3 years.
What’s SaaS? What does this mean? how is it allowing not-as-rich HR departments to have access to highly-specialised software solutions, which historically have only been available to the top 10% of the largest corporate!
Quick links to sub-headings
SaaS stands for Software as a Service (please don’t blame me for the choice of having the 2 a(s) in lower case – I find it silly too… but each to their own!) – as most of you know or has just figured it out… it’s having access to one or more software features, without having to worry about installing, hosting and maintaining the actual software that delivers those features.
Similar but not exactly the same! A SaaS solution has to be hosted from the CLOUD, but not every CLOUD-based solution is a SaaS solution.
SaaS is associated with B2B (business-to-business) type of software solutions, while a CLOUD solution can be either B2B or B2C.
Well, every SaaS solution should be delivered from the CLOUD (hosting paradigm) but there are some deep facts that some vendors try to hide from you!
You can have a SaaS solution but the way you host it, might not be true CLOUD hosting approach! A true-cloud solution is one that hosted as a public cloud and using one universal installation (except for clustering purposes and other performance-based regional installations and replications) – you can think about it as one installation that sits in a single data centre and where all users from all around the world would access that same installation and use the same software code and the same big database that’s multi-tenanted where you occupy a small portion of.
Some vendors, however, they create a separate code installation/database for each client – from the client’s point of view they won’t know the difference but in my opinion, such vendor is not going to scale well and therefore won’t be competitive enough!
OK, a CLOUD solution on the other hand, doesn’t have to be a SaaS solution – your website, for example, can be hosted in the CLOUD, but your website might not be delivering any software solution to any user – you can argue it’s serving information content to a certain audience but that’s not exactly what we’re talking about in here – we’re talking about delivering real beef – a software solution that solves a real business problem to companies across the globe.
No, I’m not going to get started on that – sorry!
With SaaS, however, the vendor does all that… and so none of that is needed, the client pretty much rents the software for the duration that they need it, and start using it straight away! Well that’s how easy it’s supposed to be but there still some phony SaaS vendors who still charge 100s of thousands of dollars or millions in some cases, because:
SaaS is no different from the delivery models that utility companies have adopted for Gas and Power. Do you think that the day of having to start a fire to cook a dinner will come back? or the days of having your own electricity generator in the basement will ever come back – when you think about it, it’s the same thing – right? I mean what % of household consumers know which plant their electricity is coming from? Without doing any research, I would take a guess that less than 25% know where their electricity or gas comes from – nor they care! They just expected to be there when they need it and without any interruption.
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