"The way to grow is by spending as much of your time as possible on the things that make you truly different."
- Geoffrey Moore,
"Living on the Fault Line"

Software as a Service

According to Gartner Group, 78% of IT budgets are spent on maintaining existing systems and infrastructure, and only 22% on new capabilities. Companies can reduce this expense by as much as 50% by migrating to on-demand applications - effectively "outsourcing" this maintenance burden. It is a challenging transition, but organizations who make the move to software as a service can triple their investment in new business capabilities while keeping budgets flat.

We look at our client's on-demand computing needs in two areas - infrastructure and applications.

Infrastructure
Most companies started using offsite hosting for internet sites in the late nineties. This happened because it was more efficient and less costly; they didn't have to invest capital in hardware, and they didn't have to attract, pay, and retain scarce system administration talent. Today, companies can procure virtualized servers, terabyte storage, and flexible bandwidth on-demand - there's very little that can't be operated exclusively in the "cloud".

Applications
The software as a service industry is still maturing, but enterprise-class vendors are emerging to provide comparable offerings to established on-premise offerings. Google provides email, document management, spreadsheets, and word processing using their servers and software. Salesforce.com provides customer relationship management software, and Workday provides human capital management and ERP capabilities. Maintenance and upgrades move from the customer's responsibility to the vendor.

Even custom applications don't need to be on-premise any longer; soup-to-nuts outsourcing of applications can be done through Amazon Web Services, or Google App Engine.

Although the technology has advanced, the economic rationale hasn't changed. Vendors can provide computing capabilities and infrastructure at a higher level of service and at a significantly lower cost than internal IT groups.

Aggressor can show you how software as a service can free up your critical IT resources to spend time on innovative new capabilities, not feeding the beast. Call us and let's get started.