What is SaS (software as a service)

It is time for all home Computer users to learn what is sas and how it can impact you. SaS (software as a service) is a relatively new form of software distribution which will likely change the way you think about buying software for your home and family. If you’ve heard the term SaS before you might have dismissed it as something only relevant to big businesses and not important for home users, but this is changing. It’s no longer just a system for the likes of accounting firms looking for accounting software, now the software industry seems to be moving towards SaS as the standard way of buying products for everyone including the home user.

To understand what changes we are likely to see, we first need to understand what SaS is. At the moment if you want the latest photo editing software to beatify those holiday snaps before they go up on Face Book or you need a word processor to do some typing you typically go to your local computer store, pay for it all in one go install it and then it’s yours to use forever. SaS is more comparable to renting software, rather than paying a large amount for your software up front you pay a small subscription fee and can only use the software whilst you have the subscription. It is not uncommon for the software to not even be installed on your machine bun run from a super computer somewhere else which you connect to via the internet.

There are a number of advantages for the software developers; firstly they are likely make more money, even though you only pay a relatively small subscription fee if you use the software for a long time you are potentially spending more money than if you just made a one off payment.It also is much harder to pirate SaS programs so the software developers will lose a lot less money in this way.Software developers also keep a lot more control over their software and the way in which it’s used.

Affordability

Well although we’ve already said that you could potentially give software developers a lot more of your pennies in the SaS system the idea of paying a little bit at a time will be really appealing to some people as big price tags on the latest software are often prohibitive. The flexibility of SaS can also bring down costs for a lot of people. If you find you don’t get on with a certain piece of software you can just cancel your subscription and will have wasted a lot less money than if you’d bought an expensive software package you did not like. You can also choose to only pay for software when you need it. Whilst businesses will most likely have to keep renewing their subscriptions home users tend to use software a lot more ad hoc, so as a home user you might for example only want a photo editor when you get back from your vacation to improve holiday snaps, if this is the case you only need pay for a short subscription to these software packages which will likely come to significantly less than buying them.

Stay up to date

If you are someone who always likes to have the latest versions of software then SaS could defiantly save you a lot of money as with SaS your software is always the latest version and because the software company want to keep your subscription they have more motivation to keep the software as cutting edge as possible, so although if you keep your subscription for several years you may found it has cost you more than just buying software would have the chances are in five years time the software will have updated so much that you’ve effectively owned two or three versions of the software, which then will not seem like such bad value for money.

Better customer support

To make sure they keep your custom software companies will be keen to make sure that the software runs smoothly for you and that you are getting all you can out of it. This means that software will come with a more continues support system and in depth support system which should help make things straight forward. No more frantically searching the internet to solve problems, you should be able to get one on one over the phone support from an expert, and if the software really doesn’t work for you can cancel and try and find one that does.

Spend less money on your computer

To get the best performance out of software at the moment you often need to have a very expensive top of the range computer which is out of the price range of a lot of house holds, however you might find that your system requirements become less important as the industry moves to SaS. This is because often you will find that the software isn’t hosted on your computer but on a remote super computer belonging to the software company. You can then connect to it via a high speed internet connection, all the processing and tasks requiring a lot of computer power will be done remotely on the software companies computer meaning your computer needs to be able to do a lot less.

Well as we’ve said depending on how you use your software it could potentially cost more money, but also not having the software on your computer means you can be at the mercy of your internet connection and the reliability of someone else’s computer. Internet connections are obviously getting ever more reliable but we still don’t all have them everywhere. If software is never discouned just constantly updated those of you who have always relied on buying slightly outdated software at bargain prices might also find themselves out of luck.

Software as a service software would appear to be the future of software, and if you have antivirus subscription software or play subscription online games you may already be adjusting to SaS for other users however it might be a bit of a hard change but one it seems likely we will all have to just get used to.