SaaS Business Model Competitive Advantage Revisited

April 24, 2013 Off By David
Object Storage

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Joel York.

What is SaaS? We seem to need to ask this question every couple of years, because the answer is a bit of a moving target. It was simple enough when SaaS was merely software applications pushed through a Web browser, but now we have to contend with the cloud, mobile and even social. Recently, Scott Maxwell of OpenView partners sparked an interesting debate on the topic on LinkedIn that got me pondering it again.

I’ve weighed in on the “What is SaaS?” question before, however, every time I encounter this debate, I can’t help feeling that it skirts the more important issue: Why SaaS? When trying to create a successful SaaS business model, being SaaS is interesting, but doing SaaS is essential. It’s far less important that your SaaS business model meet the exact definition of SaaS, than it is that your SaaS business model creates sustainable competitive advantage through SaaS…

Why be SaaS in the first place? Why not just be software? At any rate, this recent debate got me to re-reading some of my old blog posts on the topic and I realized that they were very text heavy and could use an upgrade. So, in this post I revisit the topic of “Why SaaS?” with a short visual tour of SaaS business model basics…

Read more from the source @ http://www.sys-con.com/node/2629030