Business Strategy: How to Evaluate New Software Systems for Your Organization
You can do this in two ways:
1. Develop the software in-house or outsource it to a firm with expertise in your type of business.
2. Buy the software from a vendor.
Purchasing software once was fairly simple—you purchased an application, and it was installed on an in-house server and managed by your IT staff. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when software was not locally installed, but used on a large, central server as a “time share” that accepted certain code strings to retrieve the information. Today, time share has morphed into an acronym SaaS—Software as a Service. In essence, it means that your new software no longer resides on-site, but rather in a vendor-hosted environment. That does not, by definition, imply the host server is in the vendor’s office (which can happen and which is not good), but in a highly secure data center linked to your site via the Internet.