The 4 Benefits of SaaS and Your Friendly Neighborhood VoIP Provider

SaaS, which stands for Software as a Service, typically refers to a variety of services hosted and distributed over the Internet. One highly prominent (big ego alert!) example you’ve heard of is a company called Telonium. We host PBXs (business phone systems) on the Internet. Of course, it might be more appropriate to call us HaaS, considering PBXs are hardware.

SaaS adoption has increased rapidly in previous years, and research firms such as Gartner predict continued growth, estimating worldwide revenue at $22.1 billion in 2015. What are some of the benefits of SaaS that are driving this?

1. No maintenance costs. A hosted system by definition is not onsite. This means that the maintenance of the system and the installation of the infrastructure is not your (direct) responsibility. By centralizing this responsibility to one provider, he can take advantage of economies of scale, ultimately making the end product cheaper for you.

2. Accessibility. Because SaaS products are generally provided over the internet, this means that you have accessibility to the service as long as you have an internet connection. This gives you a wide range of geographic mobility that you wouldn’t normally have with an onsite product.

3. Easy scalability. With SaaS, scaling isn’t your problem, it’s the provider’s problem. You don’t have to pay for any additional infrastructure and instead just have to increase a monthly fee.

4. Unexpected benefits. Multitenancy, when multiple customers use one provider (just like multiple ‘tenants’ being on one owner’s land), allows you to benefit from improvements based on the needs of others.

How does Telonium fit into each of the 4 general benefits outlined above?

1. Analog PBXs, along with the necessary phone lines, are expensive and onerous to install. One of the primary reasons that small to mid-sized businesses are better off using a hosted system is because they are able to get rid of these hassles.

2. Geographic mobility translates to many useful features for VoIP. For example, with a hosted phone system, you and your coworkers can telecommute. You can also change your business location while keeping your business phone number. What could be better that? Well, you can even have two different locations and simultaneously use one number!

3. With VoIP, scalability is easy: all you have to do is buy new IP phones and then pay a fee for additional extensions; the former takes a few days and the latter occurs immediately. In contrast, with analog, you’d have to buy new phones, possibly buy and install a new PBX, and perhaps buy and install new phone lines to your building. Yeah, it gets a bit ridiculous… maybe analog isn’t even worth it!

4. Unquestionably, all improvements that we make to our infrastructure benefit everyone. But Telonium is innovative in other aspects as well; if one of our customers is interested in a feature that we don’t have, we’ll consider making it just for them for everyone. After all, once we’ve made a feature for one company, we’re done with the hard work and it’s easy to provide that same feature for others as well.

While we only covered the benefits of SaaS in this article, there are downsides as well, which are worth reading into for any responsible company considering adopting it. But clearly, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for many, and this perceived benefit is what is driving SaaS proliferation into the future.