Benefits of SaaS for Small and Medium Businesses

Software as a Service, or SaaS for short, is an emerging new technology that has become increasingly popular in the last 10 years. The major difference with traditional ways of distributing software is that the clients purchase not a license, but a subscription, and the software is offered as a service, executed remotely instead of at the client's servers and accessed through the Internet. Software as a Service is closely related to cloud computing, and holds many benefits for small and medium businesses.

The first and probably major benefit of SaaS for small and medium businesses is that usually it can be effectively used to tailor the expense to the requirements of the company at a certain point of time. For example, instead of installing a copy of MS Office on each computer in the office, a business can decide to use Google Docs to keep and edit their documents online. That means the company can pay exactly for the amount of accounts it needs, and if they later change the number of employees they aren't left with purchased licenses nobody is using.

SaaS can also help small and medium businesses to distribute their software costs over a longer period of time, without having to resort to finance and loans. Instead of having to purchase 20 licenses and spend 2000$ upfront, they can pay the subscription monthly. This also makes it generally easier to change suppliers if the service offered is deemed unsatisfactory, which indirectly encourages suppliers to be more attentive to customer service to keep the subscription money flowing. It also removes the need for costly hardware and IT teams to maintain it, since those responsibilities come with the subscribed services.

Software as a Service also guarantees that a company will be working on the latest and most updated version of the software, without having to pay or renew a license or deploy it on the company computers. This saves both money and time spent in maintenance, and reduces the need for dedicated IT personal, which in many small and medium business it's a costly outsourced role.

By embracing SaaS small and medium businesses can benefit in many ways, specially in terms of lower maintenance and deployment costs and higher control over the length and conditions of the license contract. Add to that the fact that using software as a service means being able to use the latest version of that software, without having to deal with incompatibilities between older and never versions deployed and you can see why more and more small and medium companies are choosing this way of consuming IT tools.


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