How Software-as-a-Service Is Accelerating Digital Transformation

In a fast-moving, disruptive business environment, digital transformation is the key to improving operations, developing new business models, and tapping into new revenue streams to stay ahead of the competition. So why aren’t more organizations addressing their transformation more aggressively?

The biggest brake on speed and innovation is the cost of failure. It’s understandable that risk aversion is hardwired into so many organizations; the up-front investment for digital transformations can be prohibitive, and failure can be ruinous, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises.

The key to accelerating transformation is to reduce the cost of failure. And software as a service (SaaS) can unleash this innovation by helping to reduce costs.

SaaS is an on-demand model that lets users access software and applications in the cloud, freeing them from the burden of purchasing and managing complex software and hardware. Users pay subscription fees for the software they need, when they need it, so executives can adopt a “try-fail-try-again” model until they find solutions for their business challenges.

Some of the biggest advantages of SaaS include:

The next level of this business model is anything as a service (XaaS), a term encompassing all cloud-based services customers can order, including SaaS, platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service, and mobility as a service.

A growing number of organizations are seeing the benefits of XaaS. One is Saildrone, a U.S.–based startup that provides comprehensive turnkey data solutions for maritime security, ocean mapping, and ocean data gathering with a fleet of uncrewed surface vehicles. With a lightweight IT and development operations team, Saildrone found that XaaS solutions helped it scale fast and build a single, dependable source for engineering data across disciplines within the company.

“We have had great success getting adoption and use throughout the company,” Saildrone Chief Technology Officer Andrew Schultz says. “Manufacturing uses it for purchasing and building of our components in our drones; then our finance and G&A [general and administrative] teams also use [it] to track inventory.