With public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) giants like Amazon garnering all the attention, you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s where the cloud money lies. In reality though, the goldmine is buried elsewhere – in the shape of the Software as a Service (SaaS) market.
While Amazon generated over $5 billion in cloud revenue, it’s easy to forget that many businesses still use a more traditional software deployment model, running aging legacy systems as a result; for various reasons – security and cost to name just a few – they cannot move into fully virtualized environments.
With this in mind, it’s the vendors that can help these businesses absorb the complexity of the underlying infrastructure and deliver real business value which are set to gain the most from the cloud revolution.
With SaaS, it’s easy for enterprises to streamline maintenance and support, because everything can be managed by vendors: applications, runtime, data, middleware, OSes, virtualization, servers, storage and networking.
In fact, some large enterprises that are not traditionally considered software vendors have started building SaaS as an additional source of revenue in order to gain a competitive advantage.
At Open-Xchange we’re one of the SaaS pioneers, helping hosting and service providers build a business model to drive more revenue – it’s all about tangible business value. Our open source portfolio delivers integrated messaging, collaboration and productivity solutions through the OX App Suite. We allow service providers to remain flexible and augment their businesses to deliver a better experience for their customers.
While IaaS obviously plays a pivotal role in Cloud development, it’s important to remember that SaaS will be just as profitable – if not more.
