Understanding SaaS Product Development

Software as a Service (SaaS), is one of the top industries that has gained mileage since the pandemic. A report conducted by The Business Research Company highlights that the global SaaS market is set to grow from $212.20 billion in 2021 to $240.61 billion in 2022 at a CAGR of 13.4%. In 2026, the market will get to $374.48 billion at a CAGR of 11.7%.

Speaking of spending, there has been massive investment in tech and a consulting report by SkyQuest Technology says that the market will reach $720.44 billion by the year 2028. In terms of spending, according to Gartner, end-user SaaS spending is set to reach $208 billion, accounting for ? of all public cloud end-user spending.

The statistics all point us in one direction - the global appetite for technology and automation software solutions is increasing. So, what is SaaS really?

SaaS (Software as a Service) product development is a virtualized, ready-to-use environment designed with a flexible and engaging User Interface. It is an internet software product that any user can access without installing anything on your device. Simplistically, it is a cloud-hosted application that can be accessed on multiple platforms like smartphones or web interfaces.

SaaS offers the opportunity to be flexible and due to popularity, SaaS development has covered almost every sector of the industry, and SaaS based products have immense market demand.

Benefits to SaaS Product Development

Affordably Priced: SaaS is known to be a ‘lower’ cost alternative as compared to its pure service counterpart. Meaning the SaaS solution being offered will mostly be more affordably priced helping users save on the otherwise ‘service’ or ‘labor’ cost.

Reduced time to benefit: SaaS is different from the traditional model as the software is already installed and configured. This reduces the time spent on installation and configuration and can reduce the issues that get in the way of the software deployment.

High-Performance Solution: SaaS can provide beneficial cost savings since it usually resides in a shared or multi-tenant environment, where the hardware and software license costs are low compared with the traditional model. Another advantage is that you can rapidly scale your customer base since SaaS allows small and medium businesses to use software that otherwise they would not use due to the high cost of licensing. Maintenance costs are reduced as well, since the SaaS provider owns the environment and it is split among all customers that use that solution.

Scalability and integration: Usually, SaaS solutions reside in cloud environments that are scalable and have integrations with other SaaS offerings. Compared with the traditional model, you don't have to buy another server or software. You only need to enable a new SaaS offering and, in terms of server capacity planning, the SaaS provider will own that. Additionally, you'll have the flexibility to be able to scale your SaaS use up and down based on specific needs.

New releases (upgrades): SaaS provisions for regular upgrades that are made available to customers. The costs and effort associated with upgrades and new releases are lower than the traditional model that usually forces you to buy an upgrade package and install it (or pay for specialized services to get the environment upgraded).

Easy to use and perform proof-of-concepts: SaaS offerings are easy to use since they already come with baked-in best practices and samples. Users can do proofs-of-concept and test the software functionality or a new release feature in advance. Also, you can have more than one instance with different versions and do a smooth migration. Even for large environments, you can use SaaS offerings to test the software before buying.