Save money (we ALL like to hear this!)

Several factors contribute to making it considerably less expensive to implement a SaaS application than a traditional on-premises application. These factors include: 

• Lower IT costs.
• Economies of scale.
• Pay as you go. 

Lower IT costs 

When you subscribe to TAG's hosted application, you avoid the overhead associated with implementing conventional software and hardware. A typical software implementation involves purchasing and maintaining servers, housing them securely, and installing and maintaining the software. This requires the time and effort of experienced IT personnel and deflects the efforts of employees at a number of levels away from the core mission of your organization. According to Phil Wainewright, analyst with Summit Strategies and founder of ASPNews.com and Loosely Coupled, the cost of implementing conventional enterprise software is four to five times the cost of the original license. 

Economies of scale 

Subscription costs for TAG's hosted applications reflect the economies of scale achieved by "multitenancy." Multi-tenancy means that many customers run their applications on the same unit of software. For example, in a website calendar application, customer data is all stored in one database. This makes the overall system scalable at a far lower cost. If you're concerned that multi-tenancy means losing control of your data, see Will I lose control of my data? 

Pay as you go 

When you subscribe to TAG's hoted applications, you pay a monthly or annual subscription fee. Compared to a traditional software license, this subscription payment structure works to your advantage. 

An on-going monthly expense is easier to incorporate into your budget than a large one-time outlay. Youcan cancel or change your subscription at any time without losing a large initial investment. 

In many cases, subscriptions are based on metered usage so you pay for exactly what you use. Rather than making a long-term commitment to one fixed account structure, you can add or subtract accounts   at any time as your organizational needs shift. 

Save time 

Because you eliminate many of the typical implementation tasks associated with licensed software and because the software is already up and running in our data center, deployment time tends to be much shorter with our applications than a traditional one. 

Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research, compares deployment times for customer relationship management (CRM) applications: one to three months for a web-hosted application; 18 months for a licensed application. 

Focus technology budgets on competitive advantage ratherthan infrastructure 

When you subscribe to a web-hosted application, you free your organization from supporting high-cost, time-consuming IT functions, including: 

• Purchasing and supporting the server infrastructure necessary to install and maintain the software in-house.
• Providing the equipment redundancy and housing necessary to ensure security, reliability, and scalability.
• Maintaining a labor-intensive patch and upgrade process. 

As Mike McDerment, President and CEO of FreshBooks, points out, "redirection of resources is...a hidden cost that often goes unaccounted for." The more time your employees spend maintaining equipment, downloading and installing patches, and supporting software upgrades, the less time they are spending on your core business activities.  

Gain immediate access to the latest innovations

With traditional licensed software, you typically have to wait for the next release to benefit from the latest innovations or to move your organization to a new browser or operating system. Given the cost and complexity of moving to a new version, it may not even be practical to upgrade each time a new release becomes available. 

With a subscription, on the other hand, you benefit from innovations on an on-going basis. As soon as a new or improved feature appears in the application, you can begin using it.  

Join a community of interest 

Purchasing a traditional software license is very much an individual affair. When you subscribe to an application, however, you become a member of a community that has the application at the center. 

As Wainewright points out, hosted applications change the relationship between software vendors and customers. In a service environment, argues Wainewright, there is "a convergence of interest between customer and vendor that's more intimate than that expressed in the world of conventional on-premises applications."

The intimacy results because: 

• TAG constantly monitor how their customers are using the application. 
• Customers easily benchmark themselves against their peers.

Awareness of how customers in the aggregate are using an application presents the vendor with a constant supply of metrics it can't ignore. Typically, this awareness translates into improved usability, performance, and functionality. 

In addition, when you contact technical support, you're likely to experience faster and better service because support professionals can look at your implementation to see exactly what's happening. 

As a TAG customer, you benefit from your peers in a way that you're less likely to do with an on-premises implementation. According to Wainewright, SaaS customer user communities "tend to thrive"and are excellent sources of best practice tips and even templates or add-ons.