Symantec aims to help train partners to offer either on-premise or software as a service, saying SaaS will comprise 15 percent of its revenue within five years.

Sterling Commerce is introducing software-as-a-service versions of Sterling Order Management and Sterling Multi-Channel Selling. This means that the Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite for managing the entire enquiry-to-cash process, is now available as SaaS.

If you are planning to invest and introduce a new Recruitment Process Automation system, it is not uncommon for you to get hassled about comparing features, advantages, quality, benefits, and prices. Immaterial of selection, your new software will play a major role in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and your Return on Investment (ROI).

SaaS software is much more dependent on being run by the numbers than conventional on-premises software because the expenses are front loaded and the costs are back loaded.  SAP learned this the hard way with its Business By Design product, for example.  If you run the numbers, there is a high degree of correlation between low-cost of delivering the service and high growth rates among public SaaS companies.  It isn’t hard to understand–every dollar spent delivering the service is a dollar that can’t be spent to find new customers or improve the service.

So how do you lower your cost to deliver a SaaS service?

Article by Phil Wainewright

Dell Corporation (Thailand) grasps the opportunity of virtualisation and cloud computing trend to pioneer launch its broad portfolio of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications through cloud-based services.

Dries Buytaert of Drupal and Acquia is warning that Software as a Service is becoming a threat to open source and that clouds could create the same vendor lock-in customers sought to avoid with open source.

Even where SaaS companies let customers take back their data, they often don’t let them take the code underlying it, he wrote in a blog post. Data without software is useless.