Dear All,

I recently came acorss a new term called SaaS. I was not sure aware of this at all. The term SaaS stands for Software as Service. It is believed that SaaS ERP has a potential of US$ 11 Billions. I have given below a brief idea about this business model (What ever I understood).

Business Model : In the SaaS Business Model, the customer is not required to maintain the Software, Server's etc. It is the vendor or provider of the application (typically Accounting ERP's, CRM,etc) maintains the server and bear all the costs relating to maintenance of software, techinical people, business analysts, testing, Quality assurance people etc. The application is provided over the internet.

How it is helpful: This model of software ownership is beneficial for the small and medium sized business, who do not wish to invest lot of money in the ERP. Imagine about SAP or Oracle - where you need a dedicated server to host the application, a back up server for disaster recovery, you need the database, you need technical people and functional consultnat, support staff to maintain the application which is a huge cost. So SaaS business enables a lower cost of ownership of the software where the user has to pay a nominal subscription fees. In terms of systems also he needs only a highspeed internet connection to access the application, maintain the records and log out.

Security : Now a days highly secured SaaS applications are available. User will have to pass though various levels of authentication before accessing the books of accounts. It is also possible to make the access linked to a particular IP Address.

Recovery: It may be another concern for the user. They may think what happens in case of any disaster in the server hosted by the Vendor or ASP (Application Service Provider). Typically these ASP's have tie up with other vendors for maintenance of Back-up Servers and will be able to recover the data with in minimum time.

At this point of world economy crisis, I believe these vendors have a good market demand as lot of companies going through trouble period would definitely look forward to reduce their overheads (IT is considerer as overhead). And SaaS model is capable of giving the economic computing solutions at a reasonable price, high security and surity about data maintenance.