I’m making a short detour from my technical discussion of Oracle editioning to wax a bit philosophical. Why has the whole cloud/SaaS thing gotten so important to companies recently? There are lots of opinions and lists of reasons out there, mine is just another one of those, but from an insider’s perspective.
I work for a SaaS company, Aria Systems, and we do subscription billings for other companies. Now I know that lots of developers have written or could write similar functionality and maintain it. A company could also buy a program “off the shelf” to solve this, and many have. But if you write or buy your own app, you must also develop your own operational and support infrastructure. Granted, if you’re a big enough company that still may be worth it. In the end you have a system you control completely and can change as you wish, but will you wish to change it? Innovations will happen, but slowly and rather painfully as you figure things out for yourself. Every change you make had a ripple effect on your staff, so the cost ends up too high for many of the changes and you live with what you have.
That is where SaaS turns things around completely. Enhancements still have a cost, but you don’t pay it, your SaaS vendor does. And “your support staff” is magically trained on every new feature without you needing to send them off to a class somewhere. They will handle the upgrade and training on their own time and will deliver on schedule without any overtime or comp time worries. You don’t need to manage anything or send any reminders — they will let you know when they are finished.
With a company owned solution will you be able to find and hire an application administrator or database administrator who has experience with your software? Not likely, and certainly not whenever you like. You’ll be lucky to get someone with “somewhat related” experience, but you’ll still have to train them. In a nutshell, you’ll always be fishing in a very limited pool of talent. But Aria has multiple people for these roles (and all the other roles needed), all with experience in the exact app you will be using. Pretty convenient, right? And they haven’t just done this once, but many times for many different clients. That’s a depth of experience you will never be able to buy if you’re hiring employees for an in-house app.
Don’t you wish you could hire the people who are already the leading experts on the app you will be using. Implementing a SaaS solution does exactly that!