When does Software as a Service make sense for you?

Reduced budgets and limited resources need not constrain utilization of the latest software. Increasingly, organizations are turning to Software as a Service – a delivery model where applications are typically rented on demand, on a per-user basis.

IDC, the Framingham, Massachusetts research firm, estimates that the worldwide software-on-demand delivery model will reach $14.5 billion (U.S.) by 2011, representing a compound annual growth rate of 30 percent.

Today CIOs need to:

• Reduce IT costs including maintenance
• Reduce IT complexity
• Reduce risk of software ownership
• Improve productivity

IDC highlights the adoption patterns for SaaS, and other utility computing models, including companies with fewer than 100 employees and small and medium size businesses. IDC predicts that adoption of utility computing will incrementally increase while large companies with 10,000 or more employees will look toward integrating utility computing with traditional outsourced arrangements. 

The SaaS delivery model offers these benefits:

• Accelerates time to value
• Reduces the complexity of managing IT
• Reduces the cost of owning and managing IT infrastructure and software
• Enables access to functionality that would not otherwise be affordable

With SaaS, organizations can achieve a greater value in their software applications and reduce business risk.  A pre-deployed SaaS infrastructure and team of experts lets organizations focus on their business instead of implementing and running software applications and investing in an infrastructure and resources for software deployment. Instead, an organization develops a relationship with the SaaS provider for ongoing deployment, training and mentoring on demand.

Traditionally functional groups have benefited by taking the management of these software tools out of IT and into their own functional groups for greater control. However, IT organizations now also are beginning to adopt SaaS solutions as a way to optimize internal resources and quickly gain expertise on new software tools.

When should you consider Saas?

HP Software as a Service can help businesses optimize HP software implementations. For flexibility, HP begins working with customers immediately to help achieve value and get up running quickly. The typical HP Software as a Service process is:

• Map the SaaS deployment and project plan, according to the customer's business needs
• Establish continuous value check points
• Impart established best practices

HP Software also provides an in-house deployment option for customers who prefer to transition their deployment in-house.

Melissa Siems, business development manager for HP Software as a Service, says, "Our goal is to make sure the customer is successful. We drive the process to make sure that they are fully deployed using the best practices we have accumulated.”

SaaS enables organizations to reduce software implementation time for a faster ROI so they can focus on business-critical projects.  

Get Started

Enterprise Library