Taking Advantage of Software as a Service in Your Business

If you’re not taking full advantage SaaS in today’s market, you’re missing out on one of the more powerful opportunities to bring growth to your organization.

All businesses seek consistent growth, but it’s all too easy to miss opportunities while trying to preserve the status quo. In recent years, Software as a Service (SaaS) has evolved to the point where customers expect an offering from any organization they engage with—it’s getting harder and harder to get in the door without one. If you’re not taking advantage of what SaaS can do for your business, the time to start is now.

It’s Easier Than Ever to Get Started

While implementing SaaS was once an expensive and highly technical process, the technology has continued to improve and get easier. Not only that, but the cost of compute falls year after year. Just look at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an example, which has repeatedly dropped the cost of its cloud services.

It’s Not Just About the Market You Have—It’s About the One You Don’t

SaaS is a rapidly growing market, and developing an offering for your portfolio is a great way to keep your business evolving and inject new growth into it. With the increasing prevalence in the market, it’s likely there is demand within your existing base, but one of the interesting things about SaaS is that it can open up new opportunities—even ones you don’t expect.

One company we worked with built up a SaaS offering to supply their medium/large business base, but suddenly when they had a new price point they found a number of small businesses were interested. They opened up an adjacent market for their products almost by accident.

In another case, a company felt it had pretty well saturated its current market and wanted to expand. By working with SaaS, they were able to find new opportunities to grow in small markets. In fact, on average, Progress partners that implemented a cloud-based offering acquired 3,000 net new customers and increased revenue by 25% YOY. 

Work With an Experienced Partner to Start Offering SaaS

There are a lot of opportunities in SaaS, but there are risks as well.

It’s tempting to view SaaS simply as another product in your lineup, but it’s really a whole business model, and the companies that thrive with it are those that align their organization appropriately. It’s important to factor in the cost of things like security into your pricing—on-premise customers once handled that for themselves, but now you will. Your solution should also be customizable so that you can build economies of scale around a small number of offerings and really maximize your ROI.

At Progress, we’ve offered enablement and empowerment programs for years to help our partners evolve and grow. To learn more about what SaaS can do for your business, register for our upcoming webinar, An Untapped Market: Seize Your Opportunity, hosted by Colleen Smith, VP/GM of OpenEdge and special guest Rob P. Mahowald, Group Vice President from leading analyst firm IDC.