‘SaaS’y Solutions for Financial Services
Last week we discussed the pros and cons of online solutions and contrasted this to offline solutions. In many cases the online/offline debate has now matured to focus on whether the solution is actually a SaaS solution or not. Many vendors are claiming to have online solutions but this is really only being achieved through the use of Citrix or Terminal Emulation services which miss many of the strategic benefits that SaaS solutions provide. For the purposes of this document, we define SaaS using the Wikipedia definition, namely:
Software as a Service (SaaS, typically pronounced ‘sass’) is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web-servers or download the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires.
Following this definition, a number of key benefits arise from SaaS implementations including:
• No User infrastructure
• No high upfront costs
• Works ‘Out of the box’ – but customisable
• Scalable up and down
• Commercial tie in of vendor to the clients long term needs
• Service is ‘in the cloud’ and can be accessed from anywhere
• Resilience
• Accountability of single vendor
• High Availability
• Manageability
• Portability
• Low cost of ownership
• Ability to expose to a wider user base (e.g. adviser clients, B2C market)
• Ability to mash with third party online applications.
Given the large number of benefits available from a SaaS implementation, AT8 remain surprised that more vendors (especially those with online applications) don’t operate SaaS solutions and have left the likes of IntelliFlo and True Potential to dominate this space.
Written by Mark Loosmore - Visit Website