Ondemand, it’s pretty smart actually…

Published July 22nd, 2008

The best inventions and solutions are often simple and full of common sense. Whether ondemand (or Software as a Service - SaaS) is an invention is probably up for debate. However, a neat solution it definitely is.

Now is the time to come on board

The past 15 years has seen some huge technology projects happen. Many have cost people and organisations dearly. Some have been successes, though there have also been some expensive failures. Think of the dot com boom - organisations sunk like never before.

Now after strong years of development of the web we are now at a stage where if you fail to join you risk losing out. There has been a significant shift though - the cost of adoption is seriously affordable for all sizes of organisations.

Firsts steps in change

Adoption of technology is essential, just look into recent history:

• Phones - were a novelty for a while, but then became essential
• Computers - once expensive and labour intensive, now they are low cost and easy to use
• Mobile phones - remember the big phones people use to haul around by early adopters? Now everyone has one - they are more popular than computers, more so in the third world.

If you look at the examples of landline and mobile phones they have some important things in common:

• Early adopters paid dearly for the privilege
• Infrastructure took years to implement (probably still in progress for mobile phones)
• Their business model is subscription based which is the equivalent to ondemand

Subscription based model

Ondemand, software as a service (SaaS) and subscriptions are all the same business model. Pay a relatively small monthly and yearly fee and get access to lots of value and support.

With phones you might have to pay a small set up cost, but you certainly don’t pay for any expensive wiring under the ground, nor for the maintenance to keeping the system up and running. You pay to use and get access to the system and in return you expect a level of service. The same applies to mobile phone tariffs, broadband packages, etc.

And of course the same applies to ondemand solutions that are increasingly being adopted.

Clear advantages

What are the benefits of ondemand?

• relatively small setup cost
• rapid implementation
• access to different levels of support all the way
• ideal opportunity to trial a solution
• ability to upgrade or downgrade at anytime
• as flexible as your business changes.

Tags: ondemand, SaaS

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Driven. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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