Posted by Simon Dadswell, Channel Marketing Manager, Endeavors Technologies.
According to industry analysts AMI-Partners latest report “2008 U.S. Small and Medium Business Applications & Solutions Market Overview” midsize businesses are increasingly adopting SaaS solutions and are twice as likely to increase their SaaS spending for the next 12 months.
The report highlights the most popular applications for small and medium businesses (SMBs) as being finance, instant messaging, payroll processing and human resources.
These findings entirely validate our strategy at Endeavors, which is to enable independent software vendors (ISVs) and managed service providers (MSPs) to bring applications to SMBs cost effectively using a SaaS model.
Driving factors behind the growth of the SaaS market is increased revenue and cost savings. Service providers are looking to expand their portfolio to retail and business customers and increase the average revenue per user (ARPU) by offering metered web applications. SMBs are looking for the same level of functionality as their enterprise rivals and perceive significant cost savings in SaaS as an alternative to buying and managing expensive software licenses. Ease of use, rapid deployment and a reduction in internal IT, upgrades, service and support are other benefits.
We’ve been monitoring the SaaS market for years, of course, and have seen SaaS become increasingly accepted. We are all more comfortable with using applications over the internet in the home and in the business. We’ve also seen MSPs choosing to take our application streaming solution, freeing them from the burden of developing and maintaining complex IT infrastructure for delivering metered web applications. They want the freedom to rapidly launch productized SaaS prototypes and working applications at minimum cost. In addition, their ISV partners do not have to undertake expensive and complex development programs to re-write their existing applications for SaaS deployments.
What Endeavors offers in the market is unique. For a start, we have a long track record in SaaS and helping businesses to evaluate whether SaaS is an appropriate alternative to legacy software delivery. Our product, Application Jukebox, enables SaaS applications to be launched in days (if you have an existing portal) without needing to change the source code. It simplifies the application delivery cycle by streaming applications from their source in the data centre to any user, across the internet or internal network, on demand. This also means there is no compromise in end user experience and security. We own the core IPR and broadest set of patents around application virtualization and streaming and it is very likely that other vendors you may come across in the market today have licensed our technology.
