Why businesses are picking up more SaaS

The turn of the decade has marked another era defined by technological developments. 

In 2021, Meta marked its landmark name change and functional pivot towards virtual reality, NFTs became wildly popular after seven years in relative obscurity, and monopolistic companies such as Google and Apple continued on their streaks of incredible profits and technological developments. In 2022, ubiquitously popular apps such as TIkTok have further cemented their global presence, and Uber reported their first ever positive cash flow. 

Furthermore, developing trends in small business tech adoption have continued to exponentially incline - in fact, nearly 78% of small businesses have invested in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for their day-to-day operations.

Over the past seven years, the SaaS industry has increased in size by around 500 per cent. 

Businesses are increasingly adopting common SaaS apps such as Salesforce, Slack, O365, Xero/Stripe and Trello for integral parts of their daily operations, and conventional technological approaches to work are becoming increasingly obsolete. 

In fact, a 2021 study from the Society for Information Management (SIM) revealed that one of the largest IT investments for organizations in 2020 was simply replacing legacy applications 

Oftentimes, legacy software is removed in favor of lower cost SaaS options - with growing modern solutions rather than on-device applications. 

Why are businesses using SaaS?

The natural inclination towards SaaS adoption in businesses is attributable to numerous benefits, from scalability and cost-reduction to increased centralisation and cross-compatibility with other apps. 

One of the most lucrative SaaS adoptions of the past 15 years has been Office 365, which now sees over 1 million companies using the software worldwide. Office 365 also serves as a great comparison point for the benefits that SaaS solutions offer over local software.

Pricing

Firstly, Office 365 offers streamlined, scalable pricing models, charging per user on a recurrent basis for a wide collection of services. This is preferable to conventional Microsoft applications wherein different software licenses would need to be purchased and applied for individual employees, and where overspending is possible on account of licenses remaining dormant or largely unused for ex-employees.

Furthermore, Office 365 offers SaaS for communication, storage and joint-editing which enable multiple kinds of work to be carried out in one centralized environment instead. 

By providing a centralized place to perform multiple workplace activities, such as joint document editing in Office Online, workplace chat and communications in Microsoft Teams, and synchronized storage options such as OneDrive, a company can save many administrative and licensing expenses that would be otherwise dedicated to segmented and decentralized instances of individual apps.

The majority of SaaS solutions enable not only subscription models, but also customisable pricing structures based on the unique requirements of a business - sometimes resulting in entirely free outcomes. 

Centralisation and automation

Further on the subject of centralisation, SaaS applications enable companies and IT Managers to keep stock more efficiently, and deliver a multitude of work tools in a cohesive manner rather than through a myriad of disconnected apps. 

Many SaaS providers, such as O365 and Google Workspace, account for the varying needs of the workplace and cater streamlined solutions that are designed to minimize administerial oversight as much as possible. 

Rather than deploying a new workstation for each employee, and providing a range of convoluted licenses, software keys and installation instructions, new employees can be provided a select few user accounts and log in to their required SaaS applications from multiple locations or machines. 

Furthermore, onboarding or offboarding users is as simple as adding or removing users to a centralized management interface, thus removing the requirement for in-person assistance. 

In addition to burgeoning bring-your-own-device standards, perhaps one of the largest factors in increased SaaS adoption is the global pandemic and its consequential advent of remote working. 

We've seen a global need for decentralization and location-independent IT Management in the face of increased work-from-home (around 62% of employees aged 22 to 65 say they use remote working).

Deploying localized applications is not only less efficient, but practically impossible in the face of new norms. 

Integration of other apps 

Furthermore, the advent of remote working and personalized devices entering the workplace has fostered a further sense of independence in the average worker.

The same homogeneous softwares, or software setups, simply do not suit the needs of workers with varying work styles and skill sets.

Workers increasingly adopt their own tools and customisations into existing SaaS solutions in order to best perform their role, and unlike the vast majority of local software tools, SaaS boast a high level of inter-compatibility with other SaaS. 

For example, many people use the meeting-scheduling service, Calendly, to automatically schedule Zoom meetings into their Google Calendar. This requires three separate SaaS apps to function, yet culminates into a highly automated and highly customisable, one-click solution for booking meetings. 

When looking at roles with advanced skill sets, such as development or design, the need for integratable SaaS applications becomes even higher and more divergent, and the superiority of SaaS over local software becomes unabashedly clear.

Scalability

Finally, one thing that SaaS is uncontested on is the ability to scale with the size of workplace operations. 

Adding more employees, or expanding the scope of a workplace, is often as simple as a few clicks. 

Rather than designing and deploying complicated solutions across staff environment(s), SaaS enables IT management to simply upgrade subscription models and tweak a few settings for immediate, scalable deployments. 

In conclusion, SaaS applications are a natural progression in technology. If you aren't already using SaaS to power your workplace, odds are you're taking the long route for outcomes and ultimately operating less efficiently.