How businesses can benefit from SaaS

Surajee Ratnayake

Co-founder,

www.buzzflow.io

Challenges

• Enterprise software• Upfront investment• Too expensive to maintain• Additional hardware and staff costs

10 X {License cost} = {hardware, staff, Third party support, costs}

As a result

Enterprise applications seldom achieve the return on investment (ROI)

&

often require a higher total cost of ownership (TCO)

Challenges

•Business challenges• Intensified competition due to globalization and technological

advancements• Low barriers to entry• Web is making it easier for customers to find products and

solutions

Economic uncertainty Severe financial

challenges

IT Infrastructure

•Cost efficient in IT spending

• focus less on managing and maintaining hardware and staff and more on driving greater efficiencies and streamed line processes

What is Software as a Service (SaaS)?

•Any software application • a full blown application,

not a component • not located on your

premises• running at vendor’s data

center

How you pay

•Rent the software for a period of time• Instead of buying, pay monthly or annual subscription

• Pay per use

• You don’t install, instead,• Vendor runs application on their infrastructure and maintain

• What you pay covers,• Cost of software

• Ongoing operations

• Infrastructure costs

• New features*

What is the Cloud?

Cloud computing resources are not tied to a specific location

• It consists of,• Virtual computers/servers

• Data storage

• Communications and messaging

• Network

• Development environments

Benefits of SaaS

Benefits

• You are always up to date with latest features and fixes•No downtimes (99.9+% uptime)•Data will be accessible so your business can

continue despite the disaster•Grow from 10 users to 1000 users in few

minutes•Anytime anywhere access

An empty server room!

Behind the scenes of SaaS

What software can be used as services?

Email and Office Apps

5 million businesses world wide

More than 60% fortune 500 companies

IT Management

• Service desk

• Help desk

• IT Asset Management

• Conferencing

• Security

Cybersecurity-as-a-Service provider

ERP and Supply Chain

CRM and Marketing Automation

HCM and Financial

SaaS Considerations..

SaaS Vs On-premise

SaaS Vs On-premise

• Control• Vendor control vs your control

• Security• Access via Internet vs In-house, but physical security matters

• Mobile access• True mobile access vs Limited for on premise

• Scalability• Automatic vs longer planning and implementation cycles

• Integration• Interoperability with other SaaS apps vs Expensive integration with existing

software

SaaS Vs On-premise

• Vendor relationship• Continuous, On-going Vs Sell and forget

• Regulatory requirements

• Internet speed

Worldwide CRM Applications Revenue by SaaS and On-Premise

Case Study of 13 Companies in US and CanadaApril 2016

Entirely or heavily invested in SaaS for business critical systems.

SaaS Software They Used

Engineering

Overall IT spending levels of cloud companies against industry benchmarks.

Detailed budgetary IT line items.Cloud companies vs Industry benchmark

Learnings

• Cost savings from fewer customizations

• “Cloud computing allows us to shift our staffing to

more business-engaged business analysts, business intelligence,

PMO staff—instead of system admins.” – VP of IT of a participant company

• Cloud companies spent less on software customizations

• Cloud companies spent more on INNOVATION, NEW INNITIATIVES

Strategy to move IT systems to cloud

• Make explicit management’s commitment to the cloud.

• Conduct an application portfolio health assessment.

• Make cloud the preferred deployment option for new applications.

• Replace problematic applications with cloud equivalents

• Investigate whether incumbent vendors have hybrid deployment options.

• Consider managed services for custom-developed or legacy applications.