Use case one: Give me SaaS

- [Instructor] 'Kay, let's look at a few use cases. So what's important here is that software as a service, which is the use case we're gonna look at now is actually the biggest part of cloud computing, ultimately, if you look at the market holistically. So even though we talk a lot about infrastructure as a service, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google, ultimately the salesforce.coms, the Quickens, those sorts of things are making up a larger part of what business is leveraging as far as public cloud computing. So you are going to find that your first experience in public cloud computing is gonna be around software as a service, or something very similar. Software as a service is easy to acquire and easy to use. So it's just a matter of subscribing. You don't need any additional hardware. All you need is a browser typically. You can sign up with a credit card. You can get going fairly quickly. Whether it's a very rudimentary accounting system, such as FreshBooks, or whether it's something very sophisticated such as salesforce.com or Oracle. Those things are on demand to in essence to allow you to reuse their business processes within your business. Many small businesses run as many as 10 SaaS providers at the same time, serving up various applications. So it's accounting, CRM, it's inventory control. All these things that they typically would have to write themselves years ago or leverage some sort of a package application on their PCs or their servers in a data center, they can leverage over the open internet, basically through the price of the consumption, through the price of the subscription. This is typically the jumping off point for most small businesses. So you're gonna find that even though you may have infrastructure as a service providers like Amazon Web Services, and may even leverage a platform as a service provider, but typically not too often. But you are gonna leverage a SaaS provider. And perhaps you're leveraging one now, which is why you're taking this course. So popular types of SaaS for business, customer relationship management, such as salesforce.com, sales automation systems such as salesforce.com, and there's other independent automation systems as well, accounting systems such as Quicken, shipping and logistics systems, such as mail.com, the ability to in essence deal with postage, shipping, logistics, best path, cheapest path, those sorts of things are available on demand. And there's many others. There's as many as 3,000 SaaS providers in the cloud computing space right now, and they do everything from bills, bonds, management to very sophisticated ERP-based systems such as SAP, that is also on demand as a SaaS. So it depends on what your needs are, but you're gonna find that there's a SaaS equivalent out there that may meet your expectations. And typically small businesses since they're trying to become more cost-effective, they're not gonna custom write or custom own these particular packages, but they're gonna leverage the business processes that are out on the open internet. They're able to leverage as a SaaS service. And that's gonna be more cost-effective than doing it yourself. Keep in mind that SaaS is a client-server model, so in other words, we have a software as a service, which is able to serve up the application typically through a web browser and the users just log on to the web browser and leverage the SaaS. It's a fairly simple process. In fact, if you use Google mail, if you use search engines, you're gonna find very similar kinds of characteristics in terms of how SaaS works. It's in essence an application that is delivered through a browser over the open internet. So if you're going to start moving to software as a service, you need to do a few things. Number one, you need to determine what application's gonna be right for you. Are you going to need a CRM, an accounting system, an inventory control systems, things like that. Then next what SaaS provider is gonna be right for you? Is this gonna be salesforce.com? Is it gonna be Oracle? Is it gonna be SAP, or is it gonna be one of the other 2,000 providers that basically sit in the particular SaaS space? And then finally, you have to consider pricing. While they typically charge per seat, as $50, $75, $100 sometimes, what is the pricing that can be had at the time? What is the most cost-effective way that you're able to leverage these SaaS applications? Because even though the pricing is sub $100, if you multiply that times the number of employees that you have over the number of months, it adds up pretty quickly. So you need to find out which SaaS provider is able to provide you the best pricing and which is more cost-effective.