The technology landscape and dynamics of the marketplace are rapidly changing. With advanced technology made available through SaaS, the marketplace has evolved drastically. Salesforce can take the credit for introducing SaaS in a large scale at an early stage when software was traditionally offered for on-premises deployment. Salesforce changed the whole business model by offering software program as a service and hosting the software on the cloud, thereby reducing the cost of the software. This opened doors for even a small office with one employee to use the same software solution used by large corporations. This is largely due to services where one can lease space to build, host, and run their software services at a minimal cost. The number of physical servers purchased by organization has significantly been reduced to almost none. We can thank cloud service providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft for making the technology affordable.
Up and Running in Minutes In order to run a contact center, one traditionally had to invest thousands of dollars in procuring the needed infrastructure of hardware components and the servers with their operating systems to host and run the dialer's. On top of these, there was a need to have specialized engineering teams to manage and run these depending on the type of dialer's used: manual, predictive, or hybrid. Today, we have solutions completely offered on a SaaS where companies pay only for what they use and are charged only for the minutes consumed. Such an efficient approach has made even a small company with a mere handful of people financially able to subscribe to a cloud-based dialer and run their business effectively and scale efficiently. Interestingly, major corporations adopted the SaaS approach to serve the untapped markets of all sizes. Microsoft made the entire suite of office products as a service where one can scale as per their need from 0-100 within minutes without incurring the cost for hosting the software or managing its infrastructure. In essence, the cost of hosting on a cloud service is lower compared to owning your own hardware infrastructure and running the software. This minimizes the capital investment required to set up the infrastructure and significantly lowers the maintenance cost to manage them. Products Morphed into Services The technological sophistication once made available only to large financial institutions or multi-national companies who had deep pockets are now made available even to a startup firm. Enterprise level marketing software products like Adobe originally provided the best tools in the marketplace for every marketing and digital media specialist through a licensing only approach. Because they began to utilize the world of subscription, a solopreneur who wants to promote their services or products can now easily design with Adobe illustrator, Photoshop, or Creative Cloud. They can promote their products through social media, attract millions of potential buyers, and expand their business online. We are seeing products being morphed into services inviting anyone to enjoy their benefits, irrespective of the company size and volume. One can procure everything now from server to software through a monthly subscription and concurrently lease any hardware products of their choice to run their operations. Does SaaS work for AI, Machine Learning, and RPA as well? Because the fast-paced growth of software as a service is expanding globally, the latest technological advancements are introduced in the marketplace as a SaaS offering right out of the gate. With the growing number of tools available for performing data analysis, processes like deep learning, automation, and machine learning are all made available as a service that businesses can subscribe to. Advanced automation and hyper automation using world-class platforms combined with capabilities of artificial intelligence are now available for even small and medium enterprise companies through monthly subscriptions. Problems are Common Regardless of the size of the operation, the scope of automation remains the same in every organization. For example, the electronic data interchange team that focuses on uploading the data into their host system needs to go through the process of cleaning up the data and normalizing them before uploading them daily or multiple times a day. The volume of automation might differ based on the volume of data that gets processed, but the pain of going through this heap of data and the repetitive nature of these process remains the same. The team that needs to extract data from a scanned image and import them into a .csv file must go through the same set of challenges of manually typing in the data, irrespective of operation size. Extracting data, cleaning data up, normalizing it to the desired format, and processing them is a seamless process with automation. Anyone could take advantage of it using RPA as a service (RPAaS). Companies – whether they are decades old in business or just getting started – now have a common choice to embrace technology and offer a personalized experience to their customers and employees. Technological solutions and advanced products offered through cloud and SaaS are now available to implement and manage any changes that markets introduce such as addressing Reg F in the accounts receivable or the compliance need coming from CFPB.