Software-As-A-Service: Implications For Business And Technology In Product Software Companies

Many software organizations are currently transitioning from an on-premises deployment model to the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. If a company restricts changes only in the business or technical perspective, the transition leads to higher costs, poor adoption of the SaaS model, and in the worst case, the company can lose its business. Much literature focuses on changes within one domain and is generally also limited to one perspective. This paper provides stakeholders (i.e. product managers, and business managers) an integrated perspective (business and technological) with a comprehensive framework that covers changes in four domains: business/product structure, revenue logic, customer relationships, and partnerships. The applicability of the proposed framework is assessed with a case study of a large software product vendor. The paper also contributes by providing a new avenue to study SaaS, with an integrated perspective for the organizational transition period. For the industry, this paper suggests a way to assess the impacts of organizational transition towards the SaaS model. With this overview in hand, software-producing organizations can use the comprehensive framework to successfully transition to become SaaS vendors

Product Differentiation for Software-as-a-Service Providers

The market for the new provisioningtype Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) hasreached a significant size and still showsenormous growth rates. By varying sizeof SaaS products, providers can improvetheir market position and profitsby successfully acting in the tensionarea of customer acquisition, pricingand costs. We first elaborate differencesconcerning product differentiationbetween classic software provisioningmodels and SaaS. Then, we introducea micro-economic based decisionmodel to maximize the return of aprovider by finding an optimal granularity,i.e. by varying the size of services.This paper makes two contributions inthis context: (1) it provides a conceptualfoundation for product differentiationwithin the scope of SaaS and(2) it presents the first implementationof variable reproduction costs for webbased software offers. The model is illustratedby a real world case with datafrom a SaaS provider

Software as a Service (SaaS) for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): The Role of Intermediaries

Software as a Service (SaaS) is anticipated to provide significant benefits to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to ease of access to high-end applications, 7*24 availability, utility pricing, etc. However, underlying SaaS is the assumption that SMEs will directly interact with the SaaS vendor and use a self-service model. In practice, we see the rise of SaaS intermediaries who support SMEs with using SaaS. This paper reports on an empirical study of the role of intermediaries in terms of how they support SMEs in sourcing and leveraging SaaS for their business. The contributions of this paper are: (1) the identification and description of the role of SaaS intermediaries and (2) the specification of different roles of SaaS intermediaries, in particular a more basic role focussing on technological and operational issues and a more added value role with a broader customer and strategic alignment perspective