Rise of SaaS Originally Fueled by Mid-Market Buyers

SaaS application delivery models first emerged in the late 90’s. And, by now, the story is well known. The cost and complexity of installing traditional software-based enterprise applications had spiraled out of control. Siebel, SAP, Oracle and others represented the old-guard approach. Upstart organizations like Salesforce.com, Eloqua, NetSuite, LucidEra and others struck out at the very core of these models by offering hosted software models.

The capabilities of these SaaS offerings remain substantially similar to their Client/Server predecessors. CRM systems manage customer relationships whether delivered by SaaS or Client/Server. A parallel statement could be made for ERP or BI offerings.

Instead of offering new features in the traditional sense, SaaS models focused on ease-of-use, rapid time to deployment, centralized and automatic application maintenance and data backup. In addition, most SaaS offerings price on a subscription basis which helps new customers avoid large upfront costs.

The benefits offered by SaaS hit a nerve with businesses that couldn’t afford or spend the time to deploy monolithic, traditional software systems. The early growth came from mid-market companies and, over time, these mid-sized enterprises voted with their budgets on a large scale. And, of course, now SaaS is widely accepted as the premiere software delivery model for companies of all sizes.

AbSD Finds Its Place Alongside SaaS

Appliance-based Software Delivery has crept on the scene over the last decade. The characteristics of an appliance-based software product include many of the same qualities found in SaaS:

• Easy installation and configuration
• Web-based interface
• Automatic application data feeds, maintenance, and upgrades
• Automatic data recovery and backup