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SaaS Makes a Good Communications Choice for Startups

  By Laura Stotler, TMCnet Contributing Editor

The software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)), hosted and subscription models are permeating all aspects of business and technology. The dramatic change in how software is purchased, deployed and delivered offers a host of benefits, particularly in the realm of unified communications (UC) and collaboration. And while SaaS is a great fit for businesses of all sizes due to its inherent scalability and agility, it’s particularly attractive to startups and small businesses that generally don’t have huge capital investments in equipment and infrastructure.

A recent blog post from ISI Telemanagement Solutions (News - Alert) discusses why SaaS is such a great fit for startup companies getting up and running with UC solutions. One of the most compelling benefits of SaaS is a bigger ROI based on cost savings and improved efficiencies. SaaS offerings have an overall lowered barrier to entry, making them especially attractive to small and startup companies with limited capital and operating budgets. Businesses get access to all the tools and features of a pricey, on premises solution while enjoying relatively low licensing costs with a SaaS solution. And in a multitenant and shared environment, maintenance and management costs are shared among all the organizations using an offering.

SaaS UC offerings are also generally installed and up and running quickly compared to legacy, on-premises solutions. In addition, service providers handle all upgrades, ensuring new versions are pushed to customers as quickly as possible to avoid potential problems and down time. SaaS solutions also generally have good adoption rates among employees, since they can basically test functionality through limited deployments without committing to a full-scale on premises deployment. End users can determine if the UC solution has the features and functionality they require, boosting adoption rates once the offering is deployed on a broader scale.

Deploying a full-service UC solution does not have to be a daunting prospect for a startup company with limited resources. By using a SaaS offering, companies can get all the benefits and features of an on-premises offering in an easy-to-manage package, and at an affordable price point.