How SaaS approach delivers more business value

By Atticus Tysen, SVP & CIO, Intuit

Every technology leader in today’s fast-paced digital environment needs to have an IT infrastructure that is future-ready and able to support the company’s technology initiatives to revolutionize business.

Previously, the strategy of an IT department was to be a large provider of technology. Everything was pretty much on premise. But now companies are transitioning to the cloud in a big way. The first priority is to move everything to a SaaS offering by trying to move as much of the technology used, to SaaS.

If a SaaS offering doesn’t meet a business’s needs, they may want to consider vendor-managed or hosted offerings. The cloud- first impetus of any IT department is to focus on ‘change the business’ initiatives versus ‘run the business’ initiatives.

It’s pretty clear now that most cloud providers will consistently make more releases and upgrades per year than a company running on-premise IT ever could. And adopting SaaS allows the business to ride on the service provider’s innovations and evolve with them. The SaaS platform has helped businesses technologically evolve more rapidly than they could before.

Previously for example, an in-house CRM system on the premise would have required a quarterly release. Earlier, when the CRM provider gave feedback on what wasn’t working right a business heard out the person and two quarters later the business received a fix to the issue that was flagged. With SaaS providers, businesses are able to push out weekly fixes. Now an agent can tell the IT team what isn’t working and a week later a fix may be rolled out. The speed and responsiveness to internal customers goes up significantly. That encourages internal users to give more feedback and this makes the system better. Working with SaaS providers is all about speed and better responsiveness.

Progressively, a key initiative would be to simplify infrastructure by seamlessly migrating in-house IT to SaaS offerings, and overall, become a cloud-based company. The best indicator of IT success is the business outcomes it delivers for the company or the customer/user benefits it creates.