Cloud Marketing

SaaS Implementation

SaaS = “Software deployed as a hosted service and accessed over the Internet” – a key enabler for Cloud Marketing.

Businesses of all sizes and industries around the world, are migrating in ever-increasing numbers to embrace Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS reduces the up-front expense of software purchases, through less costly, on-demand pricing. With SaaS, a provider licenses an application to customers either as an on demand service, through a subscription, in a “pay-as-you-go” model, or at no charge. This approach to application delivery is part of the utility computing model where all of the technology is in the “cloud” accessed over the Internet as a Service.

SaaS has become a common model for many business applications including accounting, collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), invoicing, human resource management (HRM), content management (CM), and service desk management.

Amiro’s SaaS services include SaaS analysis and reporting, customer deployments, data migration, user training and best practices, systems integration, and custom application development. The SaaS solution expertise include team and customer collaboration, database development, CRM, social media management, e-commerce, marketing automation, web analytics, and more.

Benefits of SaaS Implementations

  • Capital expenditure is reduced by not having to purchase servers or full copies of software.
  • Faster implementation as SaaS solutions can usually be deployed more quickly as no local installation is required.
  • Removes a non-core activity to free up time to focus on core business activities.
  • Reduced need to predict scale of demand and infrastructure investment up front.
  • Better reliability and availability due to redundancy of the SaaS provider’s infrastructure.

SaaS Maturity Levels

SaaS can be classified into four “maturity levels,” whose key attributes are configurability, multi-tenant efficiency, and scalability. Each level is distinguished from the previous one by the addition of one of those three attributes:

  • Level 1 – Ad-hoc/custom: Each customer has a customized version of the hosted application that runs as its own instance on the host’s servers. Migrating a traditional non-networked or client–server application to this level of SaaS typically requires the least development effort, and reduces operating costs by consolidating server hardware and administration.
  • Level 2 – Configurable: This adds greater program flexibility through configurable metadata, so many customers use separate instances of the same application code. This lets the vendor meet different customer needs through detailed configuration options, while simplifying common code base maintenance and updating.
  • Level 3 – Configurable, multi-tenant-efficient: This adds multi-tenancy to the second level, so a single program instance serves all customers. This enables more efficient server resource use without apparent difference to the end user, but ultimately faces scalability limits.
  • Level 4 – Scalable, configurable, multi-tenant-efficient: The fourth and final SaaS maturity level adds scalability through a multitier architecture that supports a load-balanced farm of identical application instances that run on a variable number of servers. The provider can adjust system capacity to match demand by adding or removing servers without further altering the software architecture.

Amiro’s SaaS implementation team is carefully analyzing the client needs and existing solutions to be able to recommend the right scenario and solution. Amiro is an independent professional services provider and will only select vendors based on the best fit for the client.