SaaS Week

On Computing SA, Richard Firth of MIP Holdings has posted one of the best summaries I've seen of why so many companies are leaping toward SaaS.

In the article, Firth lists five key points that make SaaS appealing to businesses, including elimination of "shelfware" and the ability to pay for only the functionality that you need (as opposed to, for example, Microsoft Word -- where Firth points out that the average user uses less than 10% of the functionality in MS Word yet still pays for all of it).

Another key point is that SaaS often comes out of the operational rather than the IT budget, a factor that enables departments to implement SaaS applications themselves without going through the company's IT department -- a phenomenon studied by Gartner in recent months, as Computerworld reported.