Software as a Service

Cloud computing was a completely new term a short 9 years ago, in 2007. The basis of this technology is to move the workload of IT activities away from an organization, and to one or more third parties that have resources dedicated to processing such things. These can be, but are not limited to, networking, storage, software systems, and applications. Rather than having to create and maintain their own expensive datacenters, companies can pay a fee to use someone else’s. This makes growing businesses extremely flexible, as they can easily gain or remove storage space per their needs. Being able to purchase the use of online storage space is known as “hardware as a service,” or, more simply, “virtualization.” Being able to purchase the use of online software is known as “software as a service.” Both are very powerful tools that allow the minimization of a company’s IT budget.

SaaS, Software as a Service is the software, which is being deployed and provided over the Cloud environment (Grance, 2009). It represents one of the biggest Cloud markets and is growing exponentially fast (Rouse, 2016). The web is being used so that applications can be delivered, which are thoroughly managed and organized by a third party vendor and whose interface is undeniably accessed on the client’s side. The majority of the SaaS applications can be run directly from a web browser, needless of any downloads or installations. Some plugin’s requirement would be there, though. Blaming to the web delivery model, there is a well-noted eradication of the need for installation and process of application’s running on individual computers by SaaS. Some imminent examples of SaaS are: Google Apps, Salesforce, Workday, Concur, Citrix GoToMeeting, and Cisco WebEx

SaaS is generally acknowledged to have been acquainted with the business world by the Salesforce. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) item. As one of the soonest contestants it is not amazing that CRM is the most famous SaaS application range, however, email, budgetary administration, client administration and cost administration have likewise gotten great up

Because of their background, knowledge of the billing systems and understanding of the market needs, they were well aware of the “Software As A Services (SaaS)”, its future as well as the opportunities and the obstacles. They had also envisaged the market need for an efficient billing system. Their vision was to provide an e-commerce platform that powers the service industry at a low cost

Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) is the world leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software specifically designed for small and medium businesses, enterprises and government organizations. Salesforce.com was the first enterprise software company to break the $1B barrier of CRM sales on the cloud computing platform (Salesforce Investor Relations). It is also the first company to successfully orchestrate complex product and services strategies entirely on the Internet. This company's ability to orchestrate connectivity, cloud integration, enterprise storage and enterprise-wide applications is revolutionizing the economics of cloud computing today (Hedgebeth, 49). The strategic direction of the company is to expand quickly off of its sales base of applications, into customer service and support (Salesforce Investor Relations). As research studies from Gartner have shown, the majority of software sales in CRM today are in Customer Service and Support (34%) followed by Sales (26%) and Marketing (20%) (Salesforce Investor Relations). Salesforce.com reported $3B in revenue for their latest fiscal year and a $270M loss. Salesforce.com's success in enterprise CRM against entrenched competitors including Oracle and SAP is noteworthy, as both of these competitors rely on an on-premises application delivery model. The on-premises model is significantly more time-consuming to implement and often requires companies to

We are strong believers, that SaaS is a disruptive force in the enterprise landscape and that Salesforce in the company that has done the most to evangelize about the merits of SaaS and more recently the social enterprise. Its growth rates (most recently 32% in FY14) demonstrate its continues drive to capture market share but more importantly “mind share”. However, this comes at cost. Our measure of the business illustrates that profitability has fallen dramatically at the expense of revenue growth. Accounting policies such as deferred commissions and capitalized R&D and the considerable use of stock options has helped to inflate the income statement and keep non-GAAP results at acceptable levels. Recent M&A activity in the sector suggests

Companies are becoming more comfortable with paying for services online increasing the consumer adoption of SaaS

Abstract. Software-as-a service (SaaS) is becoming popular in the modern era of cloud computing. Most of the organizations prefer to use SaaS instead of on premise software applications. This brings the responsibility of supporting a large number of tenants by the software vendor. A good approach for handling multiple tenants is to implement multi-tenant architecture for SaaS. Multi-tenant SaaS application will run a single instance of the application for all the users while providing enough customization options to tenants so that they feel like they are working on a dedicated application. Nevertheless, implementing the multi-tenant architecture effectively is a complex task as a lot of challenges and implications are involved in the

Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) is the global leader of cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications and platforms, and operates in over 70 nations. Salesforce ended its latest fiscal quarter on April 30, 2013, attaining $892M in revenues and earning -$67.7M in Net Income (Salesforce Investor Relations, 2013). The company is also highly recognized for successfully integrating a wide variety of social media application feeds into their enterprise-class CRM systems, creating an entirely new category of customer relationship platforms called Social CRM or SCRM (Salesforce Investor Relations, 2013). All Salesforce.com applications and platforms are delivered over the Internet using cloud computing technology at the foundational level with applications often configured using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This has provided Salesforce.com with several significant competitive advantages against on-premise enterprise software vendors including a completely different pricing model where customers only pay for the segment of the applications they use. Salesfroce.com customers often pay for their application sue out of the operating expense (OPEX) budgets, which individual line-of-business managers often have direct control over. This flexibility in spending options, along with speed of implementation, has earned Salesforce.com global market share leadership as shown in Figure 1.

SaaS or Software as a Service is developing, swiftly, into the dominant delivery model to meet the requirements for organizations from SMB’s to Enterprise. Unlike purchasing on-premises software and compromising with its bugs, quirks and functionality or lack thereof, organizations are switching to cloud-based software. With the many companies offering cloud-based services from SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc., they expect fully functional, bug-free software to perform flawlessly, at best, or software issues that arise, rectified ASAP or they’ll switch to a competitor’s SaaS.

Pricing is a critical decision for any company, particularly a software company with emerging technology like SAM. This overview will review software as a service (SaaS) enterprises and summarize how they utilized the various types of pricing structures available and how these roadmaps might help us determine our future strategy.

SaaS is a service centric software model which delivers software to the end user through the internet. Users can use the software and pay as for their usage. SaaS has been able to take advantages of the usage of centralization through a single instance and multi-tenant architecture. Therefore SaaS provides many benefits to its users such as cost saving, easy adoption, easy upgradability and etc. SaaS providers take care of maintaining and utilization of resources efficiently and they always try to meet the demands and challenges of the business world. Due to these reasons most of the conventional software have been replaced by SaaS. Although there are many advantages in using SaaS it still have some practical issues which have to be solved related to privacy and security. The SaaS vendors have to face these challenges so that they can retain their position in the business world.

Fuelled by a fiercely competitive business environment that requires the pace of business and technology to accelerate, companies need to adapt to change faster, and their IT departments must deliver innovative technology solutions rapidly and at a lower cost. As a result, companies are adopting Software as a Service (SaaS) applications to address these challenges, in particular for reducing costs of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions.

Software as a Service (SaaS), sometimes referred to as "on- demand software" is a software delivery model in which software and associated data are hosted on the cloud. SaaS is typically accessed via a web browser and is paid on a subscription basis, monthly or yearly as per requirement.

SaaS is becoming an increasingly prevalent delivery model as underlying technologies that support Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) mature and new developmental approaches, such as Ajax, become popular. SaaS is closely related to the ASP (application service provider) and On Demand Computing software delivery model