Is SaaS the SMB's Recession Saviour?

AMI-Partners recently released the results of a study that found a dramatic increase in SMB interest in managed services and software as a service (SaaS) solutions as a direct response to the economic downturn.

This is no surprise given the benefits of SaaS, particularly for smaller businesses that may not have any IT staff or the ability to devote limited resources to maintaining on-site solutions.

We’re seeing firsthand evidence of this trend with the increased interest in KnowledgeTreeLive since its release a few weeks ago. “Live” is the SaaS version of our document management system, and I’ve heard from more than one prospective customer that they now prefer and actively seek out hosted solutions.

One reason is that they don’t have the resources on hand, but the biggest reason is clearly cost and the predictability of a subscription versus a big upfront license fee. In particular, KnowledgeTreeLive offers a very cost-effective way to improve the collaboration around documents and ensure that remote and mobile team members can fully participate. For example, a customer in Australia is using KnowledgeTreeLive to link two consulting offices and remote workers without having to implement a complex and high-maintenance VPN.

In his commentary on the study, Nathan Eddy at eweek.com noted that small businesses are also planning to outsource “specific IT needs such as storage, security and telecommunications.” Since documents constitute the bulk of storage needs, SMBs are seeing a real advantage to moving them to a hosted environment along with gaining the benefits associated with the document management system.