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The on-demand delivery model (also known as software-as-a-service, or saas) is rapidly changing the landscape of enterprise software and provides significant benefits to businesses. On-demand means software that is made available to the user via the internet, where the service provider (or hosting company) is responsible for managing the software and its availability.
Here are some of the advantages of the on-demand software delivery model, comparing to the traditional on-premise model.
Time to value
With no up front capital investments and a 30-days unlimited trial period, customers can instantly gain business value and enjoy the benefits of the on-demand software. The implementation of an on-demand solution is notably shorter then implementing an on-premise solution. |
“79% of companies are now purchasing and/or reviewing software as a service offerings.” IDC, 2005 |
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Financial Simplicity - say goodbye to:
- Up front capital investments to purchase software licenses
- Annual maintenance contracts with no escape clauses
- Expensive servers to purchase and maintain
- Software to install, manage, patch or upgrade
- Consultants and integrators to tie it all together
And welcome easy to predict monthly subscription fee. |
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No servers or software to maintain
Maintaining hardware and software is gone with the on-demand model. Many IT organizations are spending a great amount of time on managing expensive servers and software, dealing with staging environments and software upgrades, constantly patching software and servers to apply security patches and software fixes, all of which are not directly contributing to extracting more business value from the IT organization. |
“Given the cost of maintenance, five years of maintenance and support ca cost as much as, or more than, the original license fees” Gartner, Inc, may 2006 |
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Vendor accountability
Traditional software delivery model benefited mostly the software vendors. Once the perpetual contract is signed and they got paid up front (?!), they are "off the hook". In the On-Demand world, we have to meet your needs and earn your business every hour, day and month. This creates a tremendous challenge on the On-Demand vendors, but serves as a great advantage to the customer. On-Demand vendors are tuned to providing the best service for your needs and making constant improvement to their service; otherwise we won’t be in business for long. |
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High reliability & Security
This is often viewed as the Achilles’ heel of the On-Demand model and wrongfully so. Due to the economics of scale and our focus on service delivery we can provide a higher service levels then you would achieve internally. It’s simply a core part of our business and we are constantly investing in making it better. We are using the best technologies in the market coupled with the best data centers and hosting services out there to ensure that our service remains secure, available and scalable.
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New functionality - no more software upgrades
One of the true beauties of the On-Demand business is that we can roll out new software functionality to our customers easily, without having to ship any software, test it in your own infrastructure, and go through tedious upgrade and rollout processes. As new versions of software are seamlessly available On-Demand, customers can focus their resources on taking immediate business advantage from the new software functionality. |
"on-demand deployments are 50 to 90 percent faster, with a total cost of ownership five to ten times less than installed software" Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) |
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Always using the latest software release
One of the biggest challenges of traditional software vendors is supporting multiple versions of their own products, and testing new releases on different infrastructure scenarios that exist at customer premises (operating system, databases, application servers, programming languages, networking and others). With the on-demand model, the software vendor supports just a single version of the product (the latest release), and have to test it only on a single infrastructure configuration - his own multi-tenant hosting infrastructure. This simplifies the process of introducing new product releases, and allows software vendors to dedicate the sudden burst of free time to.... building new features that brings more value to your business. |
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