I keep noticing that people have this false belief that SaaS implementation isn’t viable for small business. Well, I’m tired of seeing this all across the web, because if I may be a bit terse here, that’s bloody idiotic. SaaS by design is actually far more convenient for small businesses than any classical software model out there. In fact, SaaS being a viable platform for deployment is almost initially solely due to its viability for small business, so I frankly don’t get where this ignorant presumption is coming from.
Regardless of its origin, I am shooting this myth about SaaS implementation down right here and now. I plan to accomplish this by outlining the nature of SaaS in how it works keenly for small businesses, and then going a little into how simple it is to accomplish, even for the greenest of startups.
I feel I must apologize to my readers in advance if this piece is a little more passionate than most of my work tends to be, but sometimes I see statements that are made of one hundred percent stupid, and it just raises my ire a bit in how I feel I should respond to ignorance.
Alright, I’ll try to rein myself in a little here. First order of business, let’s look briefly at how SaaS works. I know you’re familiar with it at this point, but this is necessary so bear with me. SaaS differentiates from old models of software in the sense that it is no longer an executable program installed on local machines from an optical disc or other form of read only memory.
Instead, it is a web-based construct loaded through a browser or mobile app, operated and rendered by remote servers over a TCP/IP connection. It is to software what streaming services are to video and audio. It’s not a complex idea when you compare it like that.
So, why do people think this doesn’t work for small business? I don’t know honestly. It boggles my mind as to what about this concept they think is prohibitive for startups and small businesses. If I had to guess, I’d say perhaps it’s because people mistakenly believe the subscription model through which most SaaS is accessed is going to add up to larger costs than license purchases of traditional software models. However, when you compare the costs of these two models, this becomes obviously dumb.
SaaS may be subscription-based, but the subscriptions are in and of themselves very cheap. Yeah, when you have a huge company with thousands of users, it may be thousands of dollars for a subscription, but if you’re buying thousands of licenses for discrete installs, you pay millions of dollars for it. With a small business, it’s going to be hundreds or perhaps even less for SaaS models, where with traditional models, it’s going to be thousands easily. Add to this the fact that purchases of upgrades or updates isn’t necessary with an organic design like SaaS, where with traditional models, every couple years sees purchases of thousands of dollars of software version revisions. Ouch, right?
Now, add another factor, that being that startups can’t afford the best and most powerful computers and networking equipment around, but can afford good internet connections. With SaaS, the power of computing is server-side, so as long as their connection is good, any of their devices can be a supercomputer, giving them the processing power of enterprise businesses right out of the gate. How is this kind of SaaS implementation not perfect for small businesses?
So, I said I’d talk about how easy it is to implement this for small businesses, and this is my closing argument because it really is that simple. Most SaaS offerings are scalable, meaning that you can subscribe with a specific, small-scale account setup. SaaS being modular and scalable, as your business grows, you can expand your account to higher tier subscriptions with no real effort involved. It’s no more complex than signing up for an email address or an EBay account. That’s right, it’s that simple.
SaaS implementation is, as you now see, perfect for small businesses, so please, naysayers, do your research before you make rank ignorant assumptions that hurt small businesses by scaring them away from technology that was made almost exactly for them, alright?