Software as a Service – Your Gateway to Affordable Enterprise Grade Software

Let’s face it; global economic recovery is still very vulnerable and businesses are likely to remain cautious about their spending.  On one hand, you have to cut your expenses in order to survive; on the other hand, your clients expect more for lesser money.  So you have to work over 100 hours per week but you are barely floating with half of your nose in water.   

Technology can improve your productivity and increase your clients’ satisfaction.  The problem is where you can get the capital to buy the software and hardware for your business.  Software as a Service (SaaS) is the answer that you have been looking for.  SaaS gives you access to powerful, enterprise grade software and at an affordable cost.

What is SaaS? 

SaaS is a new way to deliver software.  It is the same piece of software that you had to pay $10K or even $100K to implement in your office just a few years ago.  You can now use it for a very reasonable, pay-as-you-go monthly premium.  How reasonable?  You pay US $5 per month per user for Microsoft Exchange Online or Contact Manager from Salesforce.com.   This monthly premium includes future upgrade cost and other maintenance costs.  The software is developed, hosted and maintained by the software vendor.   What do you need?  A machine with an internet browser plus internet connection!

Benefits of SaaS

Optimized Cashflow

Since you don’t need to buy any software, nor hardware, your implementation cost would be drastically reduced.  You don’t need to worry about unexpected IT cost, e.g. hardware failure or software upgrades, these are all included in your monthly premium.  Your IT cost would only grow with your business, i.e. when you hire more employees to handle extra business volume.  Since there is not software installed on your machine, you can extend the use of your older machine.  And even if you have to buy new machine to replace a broken one or for a new employee, you can buy a budget PC.

Faster Return

SaaS takes shorter implementation cycle because it is ready to use .  As soon as you upload your data to it, you would start benefit from it.

Improve Productivity

Most SaaS solutions are web applications, so you can have anywhere, anytime access; e.g. you can develop a marketing plan with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software while you are waiting for your flight.  Smartphone enable SaaS solutions seem to be a rapidly growing trend that would even give your more flexibility on managing your time.

Better Support

SaaS vendors offer a series of 7 x 24 online supports; e.g. virtual training, knowledge base / FAQ, users community discussion forum and premium telephone supports. 

More Reliable Infrastructure

You would find SaaS solutions are running on redundant, high quality servers.  Vendors even build real time mirror data center;  so if the site goes down for whatever reason; it would automatically switch to the mirror site.  This is why SaaS vendors often provide 99.9 % monthly Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Better Security

How much money you spent on IT security?  Hundred?  Thousand?  SaaS vendors spent over million dollars on their security infrastructure and have a team of full time security architects to look after their data center.  They even have external security auditors to review their security model.  Nothing is 100% secured but SaaS applications provide much secured environment than most SMB offices.

Business Continuity

If your office is on fire, you can resume your regular work anywhere because all your SaaS applications and data are not stored in your office.

Better Scalability

If you double your work force tomorrow, all you have to do is to logon to your SaaS administration web page, register the new employees and pay the additional premium before you leave the office today.  Your SaaS vendors would handle everything for you.

ALG chooses the right SaaS solutions for your business to reduce cost improve productivity and increase customers’ satisfaction. Dowload pdf  

Let’s face it; global economic recovery is still very vulnerable and businesses are likely to remain cautious about their spending.  On one hand, you have to cut your expenses in order to survive; on the other hand, your clients expect more for lesser money.  So you have to work over 100 hours per week but you are barely floating with half of your nose in water.

Andrew Chan is the owner and founder of ALG Inc.