By:  Collin Quiring

We have already talked about SaaS in various levels of detail here on this blog.  However, recent conversations have me thinking about it again.  The basic point of the conversation was around the subject of “What size company is the right size for SaaS?”

One of the common theories seems to be that only small companies benefit from SaaS.  This is because of issues like affordability, internal capability, and speed of implementation or similar topics.  However, more and more news stories are about the other extreme size of company.  These are the companies that have multi-national presence, definitely have the capability and could afford to implement their own applications and yet they are using SaaS.

Everybody has an opinion about if SaaS is right and there are mathematical models, ROI models, countless organizational reasons for a company to lean one way or the other when thinking about using SaaS.  But, while the question we discussed was more about the company size then it was about specific reasons, we decided that our question had the answer of :  “Any size.”

In the end, the question of “What company is the right size for SaaS?” is much more about the internal situation of each organization AND of the application in question.  There are a myriad of reasons to use SaaS, and a company of any size might use SaaS for one or more applications.  A large company might need SaaS for one application and no others just as much as a small organization.