Develop something by yourself, or go for SaaS? Just read this and you’ll find out.
SaaS vs Customized Software
First, let see what it is. SaaS is a short for “Software-as-a-Service”, which translates to “Software as a Service”. If you just look at the Chinese translation of the term, it can be a bit confusing without specific context. Simply put, SaaS can be understood as a kind of online software that provides specific functions. Like shared bikes that you scan a QR code and go for a ride, SaaS only requires users to rent the software and use it online. While the software itself is a “product”, people tend to emphasize the “service” aspect of SaaS.
Customized software, as the name implies, is software that is customized by companies to IT organizations to meet their specific needs and is deployed for use within the company. This type of traditional software requires high fees and download and installation, and some of the larger ones also involve investment in servers. Customized software is closer to the traditional “product” concept than SaaS.
Pros and cons?
If we use the concept of product and service to understand, then using SaaS is like renting an apartment, if there is a vacant room, everyone can move in; buying customized software is like buying a house, the house belongs to you, and the corresponding decoration and maintenance costs are also borne by yourself. SaaS usually supports multi-client access, strong adaptability, and good flexibility in use.
Customized software, as mentioned above, may involve investment in hardware equipment, requiring a “complete purchase” and requiring the customer to take care of its own operations and maintenance. Customized software is owned, so the purchaser will have greater control to meet the specific needs of the enterprise, the software features are more fixed. This also leads to the upgrade will be more trouble, so it will cost much more than the SaaS model, and there are certain restrictions on the devices supported.
Choose smart
SaaS has gradually become the preferred choice for many enterprise information systems in recent years, which is enough to show its important value. Summarized in one sentence, that is: good value for low price. For example, a product manufacturer needs a product management system for product data management, a marketplace platform to communicate with customers online for the transaction process, and an information analysis system to analyze their sales data. Would you choose to buy three different customized software and have IT specialists to manage the system, or would you choose one SaaS provider and use one platform to solve all the problems?
As seen above, one might think “SaaS seems to be the best choice”, however it’s not as simple.
It is true that SaaS has gradually become the preferred choice for many enterprise information technology systems in recent years, which is enough to show its important value. However, companies such as SAP still focus on custom software development and remain a major player in the IT industry. Many large enterprises still rely on these types of solutions.
More small and medium-sized businesses, on the other hand, can choose to use different SaaS based on their needs, integrating them to form a working methodology that suits them. Now, more and more SaaS solutions are available to interconnect interfaces. For example, Teams, HubSpot, Apollo and Bouncer can already easily connect and interoperate data. Such features turn different SaaS into a mature set of solutions. This is precisely one of the major advantages of SaaS: flexibility. For large enterprises with a lot of data, it is easier to adapt to this trend. And that’s what we tend to use – SaaS to build a diverse, personalized solution that adapts to each company’s individual needs.
In fact, no matter what kind of tools are available, the goal should be to simplify and improve efficiency, so that people can focus on the business itself again. This is not only the pursuit of EEXAR, but also what we have been doing.
