Hosted Applications

An oft-quoted strength of smaller businesses is their ability to react and change swiftly in response to changing market conditions and customer demands. That agility can be hampered by a complex and inflexible IT infrastructure.

The hosted applications model, with key applications accessed on demand and paid for as they are used, allows resources to be beefed up in growth areas and cut back where demand has abated. Similarly, as new employees join the company, they can easily be added to the system. As others move on they can be quickly, easily and securely removed.

A key financial benefit is the reduction in capital expenditure. Traditional software and the hardware needed to run it are expensive, and must be paid for en-bloc, on installation. In a hosted environment, there is no capital outlay at all. Server resources and application usage are paid for through a fixed monthly subscription charge. As well as simplifying budgeting, this makes for a much more favourable tax situation, with the monthly subscriptions being accounted for as revenue items, not capital expenditure.

Hosted Applications or Software as a Service are generally associated with the term SaaS, this is usually for business application software such as Email, CRM, Accounts Packages and ERP systems. Saas is a lower-cost way for businesses to use software as needed rather than license all devices with all applications. With a well-designed implementation and properly priced licenses, on-demand SaaS provides license benefits without associated complexity and the potential high cost to equip Desktops or devices with applications they may not need.

Some software fits the SaaS model and many applications already work this way, while some applications have never had this flexibility before. A licensed copy of a word processor package, for example, had to reside on the machine to create a document. The equipped program has no intrinsic value loaded on a computer that is turned off for the night. The same employee may need another fully paid license to write or edit a report at home on their own computer, while the work license is inoperative.

Your users simple log into the Smartways Remote Desktop as if they were using the applications on the server in the office , someone on a home computer remotely connects in the same way as the office users login. SaaS achieves efficiencies by enabling this on-demand use and considerable savings in the licensing and management of information and output, independent of hardware location.

A traditional rationale for outsourcing IT systems involves applying economies of scale to application operation, i.e., an outside service provider can offer better, cheaper, more reliable applications. Hosted application use has grown dramatically. A Gartner survey in July 2009 found that customers are "somewhat satisfied". Several important changes to the way people work have facilitated this rapid acceptance:

• Fast, low-cost broadband is now widely available for remote workers.
• Computers have become widespread—most information workers have at least basic computer skills and either a notebook computer provided by their employer or access to a computer at home.
• Computing has become a necessity. Today, people accept that it’s the business processes and the data itself (customer records, workflows, pricing information) that matters. Computing and application licenses are cost centers, and as such, they’re suitable for cost reduction and outsourcing. The adoption of hosted applications could also drive Internet-scale to become a commodity.
• Insourcing IT systems requires expensive overhead including salaries, health care, liability, and physical building space.
• Hosted applications have "democratized" software, allowing small and medium businesses to access functionality formerly the domain of large enterprises. Many analytical software tools have been released as SaaS applications on a monthly subscription basis.
• SaaS facilitates data aggregation. Instead of collecting data from multiple data sources with different database schemas, all data for all customers is stored in a single database schema (i.e., multi-tenant). This simplifies running queries across customers, mining data, and looking for trends.

Enabling Remote Working

One of the key ingredients in effective hosting of applications is enabling workers to connect to their corporate systems from wherever they may be working. Businesses that have remote working facilities and that can provide remote access to corporate email and other business critical applications to a distributed workforce will find it much easier to remain operational in the event of a disaster. The good news is that there are now cost-effective solutions available which can enable businesses of all sizes to quickly make use of remote working technologies to avoid the consequences, and potential loss of business, of unexpected events that would cause employees to have to work away from their usual place of work.

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