Demand for SaaS To Surge in 2016: Critical Things Businesses Should Know Before Adopting SaaS Apps

Enterprises, the customer-driven ones, are moving beyond cost reduction. In their pursuit of redefining their businesses along customer-centric dimensions, they are adopting technologies that help them deliver greater time-to-market, accuracy, and scalability advantages. SaaS and cloud computing is enabling them to do that and that acts a catalyst of competitive strength for the companies who adopt them. Furthermore, vendors/providers, in trying to retain market share in this highly competitive environment, are not raising prices. 
                            
                                      

·      As per Gartner Inc. reports - global IT spending shrank 5.5% to $3.5 trillion but CIOs and business houses continued to embrace software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.

·     Software-as-a-Service market is projected to be around $32.8B in 2016 if it continues to grow at a steady CAGR of 19.5%.

·    If this growth continues for another 3 years as the predictions indicate, by 2018, 27.8% of the worldwide enterprise software market will be delivered on the SaaS platform, generating $50.8B in revenue.

Consequently, we are sure to witness, through 2016 and by the end of 2015 that over half of all CRM deployment will be cloud-based SaaS. Similarly, there will be rise in the demand for other on-demand SaaS-based business applications systems such as Human Resource Management, Business Intelligence (BI), Analytics and Data Mining, E-commerce, Database systems, ERP systems, corporate portals etc. SaaS is a service consumed over the Internet and so it works very differently from an on-premise model. So all/any organization(s) planning a transition to this service should make careful technical and design decisions for a successful migration to SaaS. 

1.     Data Access

Business should have a copy of their data or direct access to database and tables within.

2.     Data Security

Data in transit should be encrypted, preferably with an encryption known only to the business to which data belongs.

3.     Data Storage

It is recommended that vendor uses NoSQL databases that scale automatically and have in-built features like data backup, resilience, Disaster Recovery etc.

4.     Scalability

It’s an important element to focus on. So session information should be shared or encoded in the URLs and databases used should be scalable too, for e.g. MongoDB and Cassandra.

5.     Licensing

You can share licenses or explore open source software (OSS) options for software infrastructure, frameworks, components, or tools.

6.     User-experience

For good user-experience, SaaS application should be simple to administer, have self-service sign up process, managed user profiles, easy subscription and billing procedures.

Make an informed decision as you embark on your SaaS journey.