Figure 6: Personnel costs are the biggest TCO part for email and groupware
6.3 SaaS Allows Better Growth Management The third argument is that SaaS applications grow with you as your business grows. Companies do not have to make decisions on the type of application they need restricted by their own size, but instead they can make decisions based solely on their business needs. Because of the economies of scale offered by the multi-tenant architecture, SaaS vendors can provide enterprise grade applications in any number of user levels. For arguments sake, let’s use the “named user� licensing model to explain this. A named user license model means that a specific end-user has the right to use the application. For example; if a company has 100 employees that need access to a specific application; they would buy 100 named user licenses. The company does not have a need to roll out the application to all 100 employees at the same time. With a traditional software model, the company would need to deploy hardware infrastructure to support the application and train its IT staff to install, maintain and troubleshoot the application. In most cases it does not make sense to do this to support only 5 or 10 employees. As a result, the company may buy all 100 licenses up front.
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