SaaS Optimisation vs Traditional Approaches
SaaS Optimisation solutions have become a necessity in modern business. These solutions don’t just result in lower costs, better products, and ease of use, but better customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and streamlined business processes.
Gartner predicts the SaaS market to be $85.1 billion globally by 2019, up from $72.2 billion in 2018. While much of this growth will be the continued adoption of infrastructure such as CRM and ERP, point solutions will continue to emerge to fill gaps.
What are point solutions and why should they matter?
Unlike ERP systems that provide end-to-end solutions for problems that you might not have, point solutions are targeted to specific pain points within your business. This might be: The best way to route your vehicles, the best way to manage your employees, or, the best way to build your facilities (location and size).
Point solutions also give you the capabilities of integrating with larger ERP systems.
A unique problem requires a unique solution.
The Key Benefits of SaaS
The benefits to a SaaS solution over a traditional approach can be evident by looking at these 5 key areas:
- Reduced time to benefit. SaaS development reduces the feedback cycle to the point where anyone, anywhere in the world can test software on a web browser.
- Lower costs. You don’t require expensive IT infrastructure and big IT departments, these worries are outsourced to the company offering the solutions.
- Scalability and integration. SaaS solutions can be scaled up and down based on your requirements. This means you can drive more powoer in peak times or seasonality.
- Faster releases (upgrades) as it reduces the feedback loop and allows for much easier troubleshooting.
- Easy to use and perform proof of concepts
These benefits have allowed Biarri to develop world class tools for operational and strategic business requirements.
SaaS vs Traditional Software at Biarri
Beyond the above generic benefits, there are a number of specific benefits that we see at Biarri. We believe that the SaaS approach is far superior to ensuring the client gets a solution into a production environment sooner rather than later, it also makes the job of support much more efficient as well. Biarri’s specific benefits it sees are outlined in the below table.
| SaaS | Traditional Software | |
| Development | Easy to get constant feedback using the Mitigation by Iteration approach. More iterations and feedback from clients can significantly reduce development timeframes. | The client either needs to wait for the final version to be installed in their testing environment. If iterations are used they are usually far less frequent (and more difficult to manage) than a SaaS approach. |
| User Acceptance Testing (UAT) | All the client needs to do is use a testing environment URL. No UAT specific hardware is required by the client. | Often clients need to setup different computers and/or databases for the UAT environment. |
| Delivery | Client usually only needs to type the production URL into a web browser. Sometimes their firewall needs to be configured to allow access to our servers. | Software has to be installed on each machine which requires more resources from IT departments. |
| Hardware | Clients only need access to an internet connected device. It does not need to be powerful. It could be a desktop or mobile device. | Each user needs to have computing power, and memory, required to run potentially resource hungry optimisations. |
| Software Cost | Our optimisations sometimes use expensive third party tools (like Gurobi) which are on our servers. This cost gets distributed to all our clients in the form of licensing fees. | Each user would need to have the expensive 3rd party software installed on their computer which has the potential to massively increase the final price if there are many users. |
| Support | We can easily replicate issues because your data and logs are on our server. This often results in issues being replicated, addressed, and a fix delivered all in the same day. | Often it can be difficult to even determine if an issue is caused by the software, or the complex IT environment that it may be running in. Complex IT environments may have internal firewall issues, database issues, Citrix issues, authentication issues, timeout issues, etc. If the problem is with the software it is sometimes required to export the client database and transfer it to the vendor (via ftp, or if it’s too large via snail mail). Sometimes replicating the issue can be difficult because the client’s and vendor’s environment are different (e.g. different database versions, different patch versions or operating system versions). This process can often take weeks even for relatively simple issues. |
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