When you run a business, you typically have hundreds of tasks to solve daily. Plus, they expect you to stay up-to-date with all that’s going on in your niche and the industry at large. And not just stay up-to-date, they expect you to be very well familiar with each trend, and each new tech.
That’s not so simple in practice.
Take SaaS, for instance. Most businesses have heard of it. Many of them have no clue if they need it or not. Meanwhile, SaaS may benefit everyone — startups, SMBs, and large enterprises. You just need to know which solutions will be most useful to you.
What’s SaaS Exactly?
Software as a Service (SaaS) isn’t a software solution as such but rather a way of delivering solutions over the Internet. A more or less traditional approach to it is to install and maintain software on servers. Alternatively, you can access it via the cloud.
SaaS is the latter. In a way (not fully though), it can be compared to the difference between renting and buying. When you rent software, you don’t care about its maintenance, security, or upgrades. Neither do you when you use software in the cloud.
Many users first get acquainted with SaaS through complex solutions. For example, the popular Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are both SaaS platforms. They give you access to email, document editing, and cloud storage. Besides SaaS platforms, there are apps, web solutions, and products.
Businesses usually order SaaS solutions development when they want to solve a particular task:
- improve sales
- manage customer relationships
- distribute services to clients.
Development means expenses so it’s really worth consulting a reliable saas solutions development service first. They’ll analyze your needs and suggest what will work best exactly for you.
4 SaaS Solutions to Consider
Apps
These are the most straightforward types of SaaS solutions. They are cloud-based applications designed to perform specific tasks. You may, for instance, have heard of Slack or HubSpot. The former is for communication, the latter is for market automation. What brings together such solutions is that they are:
- easy to deploy
- easy to setup
- often subscription-based.
If your business struggles with task management, team communication, or customer relationship management, such apps may be really useful.
Products
These are more comprehensive tools designed to solve broader business challenges. Good examples here are CRM and ERP systems. Such systems are different from basic apps because they typically
- integrate with other tools
- solve more than one task.
Businesses turn to SaaS products when they need to manage a large customer base, handle online sales, or automate marketing efforts. Such solutions are particularly beneficial when you plan to scale.
Platforms
These are the most complex of all SaaS solutions. They may serve as a framework, within which your business builds and deploys its applications. Platforms are about solving many tasks at once. They can help you with data storage or machine learning — it’s as varied as that, indeed.
Some businesses have unique requirements (typically because of the unique workflow or unique communication structure). They cannot address these requirements with existing software, and then, a SaaS platform is the way to go. They should be likewise a good idea if you’re in a tech-heavy industry like software development or data analytics.
Web Solutions
Lastly, these refer to web-based applications that can be accessed directly through a browser. They are particularly useful for businesses that need to provide services to customers online, such as:
- booking systems
- customer portals,
- even online learning platforms.
Such solutions can solve different tasks for you from website management to video conferencing. The key idea here is to manage your online operations more easily or make your services more accessible.
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To wrap it up, SaaS solutions can help your business solve a lot of tasks, no matter if you are a startup, an SMB, or even a huge enterprise. In this discussion, we focused more on the development of new solutions.
Yet, good development services would normally help you with the transition of on-premise resources to cloud storage, too. Whatever solution you choose, the shift to the SaaS model is, first and foremost, about easier access, lower costs, and quicker updates.