Why we believe in Software as a Service
Software as a Service, otherwise known as SaaS, is an alternative to the standard delivery method of software. Basically, instead of handing over a “finished” product in it’s entirety, SaaS applications are operated and maintained by a service provider and usually accessed remotely by clients, such as through a web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc). It’s an area that’s seen rapid growth over the last few years - a trend which looks set to continue and accelerate.
At Label, we’re quite heavily involved with SaaS, as both consumers and a provider, and I thought i’d try to write a little about why I think it’s a great area to be involved with.
We make use of quite a number of SaaS based software solutions at Label, including Basecamp, Lighthouse, WorkEtc, Github, Google docs, among quite a few others, and of course we maintain our own CMS and e-commerce platform, LabelEd, which we provide to our own clients on a SaaS basis.
From our own point of view as consumers of the above services, we love that we don’t have to do anything in order to make use of these tools. For a relatively small monthly fee, we get easy access to project management, issue tracking, document management, etc and there’s nothing to maintain in-house. No extra IT staff to pay and the tools we need are available from anywhere with a web connection.
Our experience in the delivery of software, both on a regular contract basis, and as SaaS helps us to appreciate this even more, and the reason is relatively simple:
Programming isn’t an exact science. For any given problem there are a virtually infinite number of “solutions”. But finding a good one isn’t always easy. There are tons of best practice methodologies and tools designed to help with this - some of which we’ve talked about before, and we always do our best to make use of them. But at the end of the day - even with the best of intentions, the end goal when writing software in a business is to make money. Setting up a good tool-chain including Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration can take a little time, and the greatest benefits are often found a little way down the line, in areas such as stability and maintainability.
Which is why, in my opinion, a lot of contract based software projects are often so low in quality - because the people responsible for writing them have very little motivation to do things right - the biggest emphasis is usually on getting the work done fast.
Now I don’t mean to imply that this is in-fact how we work, or that this is always the way it works in every software company - it’s a generalisation, but it is common, and the fact does remain that we all do our best work when we’re working for ourselves, and I think that’s basic human nature. If we’re the ones working on this thing down the line, we obviously want to make sure that we make that as painless as possible.
Which brings me to the primary reason that we really believe in the model we chose to take with our LabelEd platform. There are very few web development studios that deliver their software on a SaaS basis, and that’s probably due to the level of investment necessary to get it off the ground. There’s infrastructure to manage and more to take into account when writing the actual code - anything we do for client A has to either not affect client B in any way at all, or offer them something new or improved for basically nothing. But surely that’s actually win-win for them, because all the work we do goes right back into the platform and offers improvements for everyone.
And the best thing of all is in the quality and stability of the end result. We have industry wide best practice procedures in place, right from automated testing and CI, to deployment, backups and error recovery - because it’s in our own best interests to do so, not because any one client is paying directly for these services.
We do admit that we sometimes find it a hard sell to clients, that they pay for a website and software which they don’t end up owning in it’s entirety. We have in the past lost jobs on this basis alone - but really that’s business and you always win some and lose some. From all of our existing customers, we’ve never had a single complaint about the level of service we provide.
So if you’re thinking about the pros and cons of a SaaS solution versus an entirely bespoke or full delivery based project, then you should really ask yourself if you’d rather own something that you’re entirely responsible for, i.e. you don’t receive anything unless you pay for it, and have to shoulder all of the burden of keeping it running and up-to-date, or if it’s better to forego the IP in favour of a far lower initial investment and continuous maintenance for one small on-going monthly fee.
We know which we choose when faced with that decision.
