I have increasingly fallen in favor of companies exploring entering the SAS market — i don’t mean just selling their solutions to ISPs/SAS, etc but becoming a SAS vendor themselves. Many products in the systems management arena lend themselves well to SAS-style offerings, even as an adjunct to standard enterprise licensing models. Virtualization combined with the web have made becoming a SAS vendor practical in many cases — of course there are many complications to consider around the complexity of the business services involved, but the upside– even aside from revenue streams — is great:
- control over the software implementation — you can be your own best case study, learning from practical implementations of your software
- gain access to broader range of customers — those who otherwise want nothing to do with certain aspects of IT operations
- build sustainable revenue streams from subscription models (often multi-year in nature)
Companies have built the biggest businesses around service models, smaller companies can as well. The hurdle to get started is a lot smaller than it ever was. You can even use someone else to host your hosted offering!