Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Communities and Markets

SaaS offers tend to be tied in with markets, service catalogs, and communities. These can be very rich: For example, an online SaaS market might permit you not only to sell one or more applications but also to enable others to act as retailers or distributors, under fairly complex policies: You might authorize distributors who in turn might authorize other distributors, but those distributors might not further authorize additional downstream entities to be distributors. These market constructs can enable richer capabilities in less time, greater sharing of best practices, more extensions to core functionality, and so forth.

Although licensed products also have communities associated with them, the public access inherent in the SaaS model and the ease of enabling try-before-you-buy—or what sales professionals call the puppy dog sale—provides SaaS with an edge.