What is SaaS?

SaaS has become a common delivery model for many business applications, including accounting, collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM), management information systems (MIS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), invoicing, human resource management (HRM), content management (CM) and service desk management.Now a days, SaaS has been incorporated into the strategy of all leading enterprise software companies. SaaS has all the potential to reduce your IT support costs by outsourcing hardware and software maintenance and support to the SaaS provider

The growing use of web-based user interfaces by applications, along with the proliferation of associated practice (e.g., web design), continuously decreased the need for traditional client-server applications. Consequently, traditional software vendors' investment in software based on fat clients has become a disadvantage (mandating ongoing support), opening the door for new software vendors offering a user experience perceived as more "modern". The standardisation of the web stack (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, HTTP), the increasing popularity of web development as a practice, and the introduction and ubiquitousness of web application frameworks like Ruby on Rails gradually reduced the cost of developing new SaaS solutions, and enabled new solution providers to come up with competitive solutions, challenging traditional vendors. The increasing penetration of broadband Internet access enabled remote centrally-hosted applications to offer speed comparable to on-premises software. The standardisation of the HTTPS protocol as part of the web stack provided universally available lightweight security that is sufficient for most everyday applications. The introduction and wide acceptance of lightweight integration protocols such as REST and SOAP enabled affordable integration between SaaS applications (residing in the cloud) with internal applications over wide area networks and with other SaaS applications.

SaaS applications are often updated more frequently than traditional software,in many cases on a weekly or monthly basis. This is enabled by several factors:
1. The application is hosted centrally, so new releases can be put in place without requiring customers to install new software.
2. The application only has a single configuration, making development testing faster.
3. The application vendor has access to all customer data, expediting design and regression testing.
4. The solution provider has access to user behaviours within the application (usually via web analytics), making it easier to identify areas worthy of improvement.
5. Accelerated feature delivery is further enabled by agile software development methodologies.Such methodologies, which have evolved in the mid-1990s, provide a set of software development tools and practice to support frequent software releases.

How can SaaS contribute to small and medium business?
A larger business may be able to spend or invest huge money on technology. Any software will require skills and these skills are not cheep. These are not available on demand too. But to cop up with the challenging world all business has to adopt to the new technologies. Technology can not only reduce your cost but also it can remarkably increase you operational efficiency. SaaS enables you operate use the latest technology with out having a large IT team. It is a win-win situation. The companies who are providing you with services on SaaS can have the best resources which will be shared between many small and medium business.