SaaS-sy year ahead

Steve Russell expects 2008 to be a bumper year for the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model in Asia – not surprising given that Russell is the President of leading on-demand CRM software vendor Salesforce.com.

Industry research pundits from Gartner & IDC share Russell’s optimism, and many traditional software vendors have also jumped onto the SaaS bandwagon – Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and Adobe, amongst others, have recently launched hosted applications of various sorts. Many of these SaaS products are aimed squarely at the small & medium business (SMB) segment. The lower upfront cost of the SaaS model is often touted as a major selling point in the SMB market.

However, adopting SaaS-style hosted applications is not without its headaches – reliability, security & vendor lock-in are all very real issues that SMBs evaluating on-demand, hosted software must address carefully.