Making the case for SaaS: 3 top challenges and solutions

Making the Case for SaaS: 3 Top Challenges and Solutions The benefits of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-enabled services are many. Unlike with a traditional software purchases and in house management, there's no big capital outlay initially. Instead, there's a predictable, pay-as-you-go yearly expense, which can yield a nearly immediate return on investment. And with SaaS-enabled services, although the IT department still plays a role -- generally managing the software contracts and vendor relationships -- much of the time spent in performing mundane tasks like virus checking, software updates, and user support, is shifted to outside vendors. The savings can be considerable -- in some cases a reduction of as much as 50 percent, according to some analysts -- compared to the cost of purchasing software outright.   Multi-Enterprise SOAs: Five Ways to Drive Collaboration and Business Growth Today's IT essentially follows a pre-industrialization model. Prior to Henry Ford's innovations, each automobile was assembled individually - in a monolithic manner. Similarly, IT continues to regard each process as a monolithic unit to be "hooked into" the overall system. What's needed today is the IT equivalent of Ford's assembly line -- an interoperable platform for enabling heterogeneity.   The 5 Automation Imperatives: How BSA Works For today's CIOs, the problems of cost, complexity and compliance are virtually insurmountable under the current siloed structure of IT, which is focused on maintaining a growing and haphazard infrastructure. They are unable to focus enough resources on the innovation needed to make the business successful. To address these problems, and play its proper role as a driver of business results, IT must shift its focus to becoming a service-centric line of business.   How to Rethink Virtualization in Business Terms: 3 Steps After achieving initial success with targeted virtualization implementations, data center managers are looking to gain a wider range of benefits from virtualization. Today the focus is shifting to the bigger question: How can we apply virtualization strategies more broadly across our environment to achieve better business outcomes?   Advanced Load Balancing: Eight Must-have Features Early-generation server load balancers are tried and true solutions for improving the availability and scalability of an organization's application infrastructure. Nonetheless, enterprises that persist in using such products run the risk of exposing themselves and their customers to increasingly poor application performance and a seemingly endless stream of application-layer security threats. There are eight criteria detailed here that can be used to help ensure your company selects the best-available solution.   3 Trends Affecting Business Performance: Closing the Strategy-Execution Gap Almost all organizations around the world are confronted with the same fundamental business pain -- the disconnect between the world of making decisions and the world of executing them. Research from organizations such as the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative indicates that as many as 9 out of 10 organizations fail to execute their strategies today. This gap between strategy and execution keeps organizations from optimizing business performance. eNewsletter Information: You are receiving this e-mail because you are a loyal subscriber to the Web Buyer's Guide Member Update with the e-mail address ignoble.experiment@arconati.us. If you no longer wish to receive Web Buyer's Guide Member Update, unsubscribe here. Copyright © 2008 Ziff Davis Enterprise. All Rights Reserved. Ziff Davis Enterprise, 28 East 28th Street, New York, NY 10016 Privacy Policy