Those of you who read the On-Demand / Software as a Service Application Platforms wiki-paper on the e-Sourcing Wiki [WayBackMachine], already have fifteen (15) great reasons to go SaaS, which include:
- Pay As You Go
- Instant Deployment
- Single Instance
- Economies of Scale
- Provider Handles Administration, Maintenance, and IT Headaches
- Free Upgrades
- The Customer Has the Leverage
- Anywhere Access
- Buy What Is Needed, And Only What Is Needed
- Single, Accountable Entity
- Regular, Automated Data Backup
- Built for Change
- Unparalleled Collaborative Capabilities
- Integration with Office Applications
- Low Total Cost of Ownership
However, perhaps the biggest reason you should go SaaS, is:
- Sustainability
Reading the article “Analyzing Costs and Benefits”, I was reminded just how fast energy costs are rising (much faster than the referenced rate from the Energy Information Administration) and how much savings there is to be had just by reducing your energy needs.
And if you maintain all of your systems in house, then, unless you are manufacturer, one of your biggest energy needs is your IT data center – especially since you probably can’t afford to be updating all of your hardware every other year (like many modern data centers do). If you maintain PC-based servers for 4 (or 5 years), and mini-computers / racks for that long or longer, than your hardware needs are probably three or four times what they would be if everything was running on latest technology with real-time load-balancing and virtualization. Furthermore, chances are each of these machines is requiring at least twice as much energy to run as a modern machine with a lower power utilization processor and much better energy conservation technology. All in all, you’re probably consuming at least eight times as much energy as you need to be, especially when compared to an up-to-date data center used by a SaaS provider.
Furthermore, not only are you allowing for significant energy savings by using SaaS, but you’re also contributing to green in a big way, because the hardware resources of a SaaS provider are shared between multiple organizations. This not only allows for even more efficient resource utilization, but also reduces the amount of hardware, and thus the amount of future electronic waste, that will need to be recycled.