When it comes to small and midsize business customers, the general assumption that gets made in the vendor community is that they would all line up to use enterprise-class applications if only those apps were available as a service.
The second part of the equation is pretty much true. A lot of SMB customers don’t have the IT talent on hand to run a lot of application software on-premises. As a result, the economics surrounding SAAS (software as a service) applications are pretty compelling.
But what still holds a lot of SMB customers back is the cost of those applications. Faced with prices that can range anywhere from $50 to $150 a month per user, a lot of SMB customers balk at the total cost of ownership of these applications over an extended period of time. To make matters worse, they also feel that they are paying to make use of a whole lot of features they don’t really need.
That’s why there’s growing interest in the SAAS category now that Google and Microsoft are talking it up.
Read the full story on eWEEK Midmarket.