In a blinding flash of the obvious today, March 18, 2008, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson admits the U.S. economy is in “sharp decline.” Ya think? $1000 gold? $110 oil?The government reported that in February employers slashed more than 63,000 jobs— the most in 5 Years. Most were lost in construction, manufacturing, retailing, financial services and a variety of professional and business services. The very industry segments that drive most of the GNP! Companies must now be lean, they must adjust their business plans, and they need to take advantage of quality data and easily deployable software that will allow them to lower labor rates and better understand their customers changing buying patterns to survive.

Using software deployed in SaaS (software as a service) is one key to being lean. SaaS is a remotely hosted solution, typically in a shared “multi-tenant” configuration. They are characterized as being fast to configure and deploy since there is no hardware footprint to size or install, no DR planning, standard browser based interfaces and the user screens are generally intuitive and easy to use. With Tax season right around the corner many of you are likely to be using your favorite tax program in a SaaSy way instead of installing software on your computer. SaaS has been the preferred and accepted mode for financial software in the SMB (small-medium business) market for a number of years now.

Your CIO and “enterprise architect” may insist on software installed and implemented behind the firewall just because they don’t trust it or want to see “what everyone else is going to do” but in this day of cutting operational and support costs you have to seriously consider it for all of your software needs, including mission critical ERP. I’ve heard architects say if the internet goes down in a SaaS environment then we can’t function. My response is “you can’t go back”. To much of business process and business continuity is over the internet anymore for that to be a genuine reason. With proper security, internet connection redundancy, defined SLAs and now-common web services integration there is no reason to avoid it any longer.

Be SaaSy

What is in my MP3 player today? Billy Burnette, Memphis in Manhattan.