1. Reduced Integration and Technology Costs
Companies must lower IT costs to lessen their overall spending. The current rule-of-thumb is that spending must decrease each year, posing a challenge to companies that must not only maintain existing IT systems, but also implement new technologies and approaches, such as subscription-based applications. Although a subscription solution requires new spending, it can substantially reduce other IT spending. Businesses are able to preserve cash while taking advantage of the power offered through the latest technology and software.
2. Faster Response to Internal Business Need
Most business technology is inflexible and difficult to adapt to business change. Just as the technology is deployed, there is a change in a customer requirement, a new product line which requires more characters for the part number, or 25 new users need to be added. In each case, the existing system needs to be extensively modified, tested, and reimplemented. In a subscription-based environment, all that ‘heavy lifting’ is done for you – without disruption to your business. The solution can be easily modified, integrated, extended, or have new users added, thereby allowing you to focus on your business, not the technology.
3. Security and Regulatory Compliance
In today’s harsh business environment, being an executive or a board member of a company is not for the faint-of-heart. A whole raft of new laws and rules meant to protect the public, provide transparency in corporate management, facilitate government regulation, and smooth the interactions between businesses and their stakeholders will impact businesses for decades to come. Laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, the PATRIOT Act, Basel II, the California Privacy Act, Graham-Leach-Bliley, and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) require that business managers take full responsibility for their actions and secure their information and systems like never before. Subscription-based applications are hosted in secure environments that meet most, if not all of the information security requirements, required by law. Businesses don’t have to spend dollars locking down their traditional in-house systems to meet such requirements.
4. User Empowerment
Many users will find themselves participating in one or more business processes that they have no control over. Subscription-based applications allow for ‘application portability’ that follows the user to whatever role they may take. Functionality which was traditionally only offered to the ‘knowledge worker’ can now be made available to others to increase productivity and lower business costs. No need for costly infrastructure. Simply add another user subscription and off you go! Financial and productivity tools are now available to more people than ever, allowing your employees to get their jobs done faster and better than ever before.
5. Competitive Advantage
At a fundamental level, one basic business problem affects all of the rest. That problem is “inflexibility.” Basically, if companies are flexible enough, they can solve most business problems, since few problems are beyond the reach of the flexible company. With flexibility, companies can adjust offerings to changes in customer demand, build new products and services quickly and efficiently, and optimize their people’s talents to maximize productivity- providing the best possible direction for the future. Fundamentally, flexibility is the key to every organization’s profitability, longevity, and success. The most important aspect of the competitive advantage is the ability to meet the demanding needs of the market faster than the competition. Companies that improve their business often outdistance the competition as they use change to their advantage. Strategic advantages — those that distinguish one company’s value proposition from another’s — can be far more durable than tactical advantages, such as better responsiveness to change.