How is SaaS beneficial to Salesforce?

Software as a Service or SaaS is a way of delivering applications over the Internet – as a service. Also known as cloud software, ASP, on-demand software or hosted software. The first applications for consumers were things like webmail, bookmarking and photo sharing. In business, things like recruitment, expenses and customer relationship management were among the early innovations. SaaS has since become a widely-used business model with more and more different kinds of applications available via the cloud.

So what's been the driver for business seek cloud solutions? One attraction was how fast they could get services up and working. Compared with complex in-house IT projects with long lead times, SaaS implementation is fast and easy. Harvard Business Review reported that the head of marketing at a major credit card company was "like a kid in a candy store when told it would take only five weeks to get a cloud application running. IT had originally quoted 18 months."

SaaS is one of several cloud computing solutions for business IT issues. Other ‘as-a-Service’ options include:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – the provider hosts hardware, software, storage and other infrastructure component
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Everything as a service (XaaS) – which is essentially all the "aaS" tools neatly packaged together.
The payment model for these kinds of services is typically a per-seat, per-month charge based on usage – so a business only has to pay for what they need, reducing upfront costs.