When Times Get Tough, Get SaaS(y)

Another week of front-page bad news has dimmed the optimism I had in last week's Editor's Corner. Congressional intransigence on the bailout bill, combined with another stormy Monday on Wall Street, points toward a grimmer economic future. In light of this, those of you planning on implementing a content management system in the next year may want to start to think about ways to trim your costs in anticipation of tighter IT budgets. One way to do that could be to consider Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) instead of an in-house implementation behind the firewall.

The chief advantage of a SaaS solution is that your company only needs to invest in a subscription for the software. The SaaS vendor will deal with all the infrastructure costs, so you don't have to. That can cut costs dramatically, and instead of a huge payment, you are looking at a monthly subscription fee. It should reduce your initial investment significantly, which should please your nervous CFO and make the whole project more palatable from a budgetary standpoint.

Of course, what pleases your CFO may may agitate your CIO, who may be more concerned about storing your company's valuable content outside the cozy and safe confines of the company firewall, but that's a tradeoff your company needs to be willing to make if you go with a SaaS solution. It's worth noting that security has to be job number one for the SaaS vendor, or it risks losing its customer base (which it only has for the length of the subscription). If your company policy allows it, the CIO may be able to live with it.

The SaaS solution not only lowers costs, it simplifies implementation because the SaaS vendor takes care of a lot of the heavy lifting for you. You don't have to worry about installing a bank of servers to deal with your data. That's not to say, you don't still have to go through the configuration process for your organization's unique needs, but without the hardware side, it takes away a layer of complexity from the project.

And you no longer need to dedicate members of your staff to patch management and maintenance. One of the big advantages of a SaaS solution is that whenever there is an update, it gets done behind the scenes by the vendor. You don't have to do anything (except figure out what's changed). The software is delivered through a web browser making your content easily accessible for your employees, regardless of where they are.

Anyone who has ever tried to implement a content management project knows that it's a complex process fraught with political and technical pitfalls. Going with an SaaS solution doesn't necessarily eliminate these factors, but it does simplify the entire project. It seems clear that the economic malaise we are in is probably going to last a while, but that doesn't mean that your company's IT investment needs to stop, only that you have to get a little smarter in how you go about it. Looking at a SaaS content management system may make sense in tough economic times. - Ron