In the past, when you wanted to use enterprise software, you'd have to purchase it, and hire a specialist to install and maintain it going forward. Now this is a fairly complicated ordeal, given that the average Joe on the street doesn't know much about software. So most businesses, not wanting to distract themselves from their core competency, hired external consultants to handle this procedure, instead of employing internal experts full time.
To make matters worse, software needs a hardware environment within which to exist. This hardware has to be purchased; it has to be setup; it needs to be cleaned; and since it depreciates with time, it needs to be upgraded and ultimately replaced. So not only did businesses have to hire software specialists to maintain the software, they also required hardware specialists to ensure continuous uptime. And whenever this function was outsourced to external consultants, call-out fees added to the already sizeable bill.
Now with the advent of the internet and web applications, that's all changed. Highly interactive software is now available online, with one of the best known examples being your internet banking. You connect to the internet, point your web browser (such as Internet Explorer) to the bank's website address, you type in your username and password, and log in. All your data is available at your fingertips, from any computer in the world with an internet connection. To use this service, you pay your bank an affordable monthly fee. You don't have to worry about maintaining any software, conducting backups or hardware uptime. That's all handled behind the scenes.
At Kontos Databases we manage our own software environment full time, and we're good at it. Our clients don't need to be concerned with hiring expensive IT specialists to ensure continuous uptime. And why should they? It's not their core competency. But it is ours. We can do a far better job of maintaining an IT environment than our clients in agriculture for example. In other words, they leverage our economies of scale, and get access to a first class database environment at a fraction of the cost of setting up their own.
Thus Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software delivery model whose up-front costs for usage are low and scale in proportion to the amount of services consumed. We have adopted this delivery model at Kontos Databases because it is both convenient to us and cost-effective for our clients.